Thursday's Bing API Outage Took Down DuckDuckGo, Copilot, and ChatGPT Search

Thursday long-time Slashdot reader mschaffer reported that "Microsoft's search engine isn't working correctly, and many alternative search engines that rely on it are down, too."

Bing started "having issues" around 1:30 a.m. EST, reports SearchEngineLand (citing Downdector.com, and sharing screenshots of Bing.com searches failing — even on partner sites like DuckDuckGo).

By Thursday morning search capabilities for ChatGPT, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and other platforms had stopped working, reports the Verge, saying the issues "appeared to be linked to Bing's API and any service that relies upon it." While Microsoft's own web search engine, Bing, was also seemingly affected, according to TechCrunch, it came back online eventually. By 11AM ET, OpenAI posted a note indicating the issue had been resolved, saying, "Between around 10:10 PM PT yesterday and 6:50 AM PT today, we experienced a partial outage affecting ChatGPT's web-browsing capabilities due to Bing being unavailable." DuckDuckGo posted that "we're coming back up" at around 10:30AM ET, and so did Ecosia, which is "the search engine that plants trees."
Copilot users experienced "a loading loop that prevented users from accessing the service," according to the article, while ChatGPT users attempting a web search got error messages instead.

Ars Technica adds that it also stopped searches from Microsoft's Edge browsers (that hadn't changed their default search settings). But they also had a disturbing observation for people worried that web search is dominated by Google: "most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage... The overwhelming majority of search tools offering an alternative" to Google are using Google, Bing, or Yandex... Yandex, being based in Russia, is a non-starter for many people around the world at the moment."
But their article digs deep into the alternatives, starting with this list compiled by undergraduate CS major Rohan Kumar of search sites with their own indexes — including Mojeek, Stract, and Right Dao and Yep...

Reminder yet again

[Luckyo]

Remember, DDG only takes "some" results from Bing, and "some" from other search engines. It's totally not the same thing*.

*it may be the same thing with minor randomization.

On a serious note, how many cases like these do we need to just stop with marketing BS and just have a statement that DDG is obviously an alternative Bing frontend similar to Startpage being an alternative Google frontend?

Re:Reminder yet again

[markdavis]

Most of DDG is from Bing data, for sure (and by most, I mean really most). All of StartPage is from Google data. And then there is Yandex (Russian, which many of us would throw out). Still, using DDG and StartPage means you are at least NOT giving out information to Google and Microsoft, which is good. But it still means your life is filtered through the lens of these two entities (which I can say certainly often deviate from my preferences and values).

So the search world is pretty much dominated by Google and Microsoft's control. Like that is a surprise. The article pointed out https://stract.com/ [stract.com] which looks interesting, since it is open-source. I might explore it a bit and hope that it grows and catches on. We really need more players in this space. Just like we need to stop enabling Google to take over the web with all the chrom* browsers....

Speaking of which, Linus Tech has started a series on "De-Goggling Your Life" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] and yes, it is ironic that their videos are ONLY on Google YouTube; not present also on, say, Rumble.

Re:

[Luckyo]

The joke is that DDG keeps telling everyone that they use many search engines and post cumulative results.

And yet every time Bing goes it, DDG goes out with it. While those other search engines going out doesn't seem to cause outages on DDG.

Re:Reminder yet again

[Tony Isaac]

using DDG and StartPage means you are at least NOT giving out information to Google and Microsoft

I wouldn't be too sure about that.

First, every link you click in DDG search results, takes you to a website that certainly *does* share your information with Google, and probably 10-20 other marketing firms.

Second, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that there's some kind of metadata that can connect your search result click from DDG, to the web site it took you to.

Third, if you're running on Windows or iOS, those platforms know every network address you connect to, and both Microsoft and Apple use your data for marketing purposes.

I believe privacy is a myth.

Re:

[markdavis]

>"First, every link you click in DDG search results, takes you to a website that certainly *does* share your information with Google, and probably 10-20 other marketing firms."

Yes, but that is *less* data about you. Knowing you visited is one thing, knowing why or how is yet another.

>"I believe privacy is a myth."

Total/utter privacy, perhaps. But that doesn't mean there aren't amounts/degrees of such. Part of protecting your privacy is to "spread out" the data so it isn't concentrated in one place.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Knowing you visited is one thing, knowing why or how is yet another.

Why exactly is this distinction important?

People use search engines to find other web sites. What they really want, is on those other web sites. How they found those sites, has little impact on privacy. Data aggregators are able to put together a very complete picture of every site you visit.

Re:

[LazyBoot]

and yes, it is ironic that their videos are ONLY on Google YouTube; not present also on, say, Rumble.

Doesn't LTT also post on their own video site (floatplane)?

Re:

[markdavis]

>"Doesn't LTT also post on their own video site (floatplane)?"

Never even heard of it until now.

Looks like it is a login-only site (maybe paywall?) so I don't know what is on it.

Copilot went down

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

And thousands of third-rate programmers around the world suddenly found themselves with no clue how to do their work.

Re:Copilot went down

[Tony Isaac]

I use Copilot all the time, and I'm pretty sure it won't help a third-rate programmer very much. You do have to know what you want, and whether the code it generates achieves what you want. Much of the time, the code it spits out doesn't even compile. For example, the code might be fine in itself, but it often injects it at a spot that doesn't make sense, like creating a function inside an existing function, or inside an if / else block.

Copilot _does_ save me a lot of time, because I know how to take what it spits out and adapt it for my use, and I know when the code is right.

Re:

[cascadingstylesheet]

I use Copilot all the time, and I'm pretty sure it won't help a third-rate programmer very much. You do have to know what you want, and whether the code it generates achieves what you want. Much of the time, the code it spits out doesn't even compile. For example, the code might be fine in itself, but it often injects it at a spot that doesn't make sense, like creating a function inside an existing function, or inside an if / else block.

Copilot _does_ save me a lot of time, because I know how to take what it spits out and adapt it for my use, and I know when the code is right.

Yep, it's a tool, like any other. It helps the first rate better than the third rate.

But it's the cool kid thing right now to rag on it.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I couldn't stand that. I'll re-write other people's code from scratch if it's less than perfect, rather than trying to debug it.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Sure, I get that. Copilot i most useful in areas of a language or framework where you are less familiar. For example, doing an XSL transform in JavaScript, or writing a text encoder in C#. Copilot can get you 80% of the way there, and you just have to tweak it to fit your use case.

And?

[fahrbot-bot]

Bing API Outage Took Down DuckDuckGo, Copilot, and ChatGPT Search

Somehow the World kept spinning ...

So, uh, what was the root cause again?

[vik]

Lots of outage reports and op ed about the search engine duopoly, but not too much about what actually went wrong though, is there?

Re:

[Mirnotoriety]

> Lots of outage reports and op ed about the search engine duopoly, but not too much about what actually went wrong though, is there?

What do you want from slashdot, real actual technical information /s