A number of different web search and AI tools experienced outages early Thursday morning including Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the search engine DuckDuckGo, Copilot, and ChatGPT’s internet search abilities. At 6:30 a.m. ET, DuckDuckGo and Microsoft’s AI Copilot are still unavailable for numerous users in the US. Bing’s website itself appears to be working and showing search results, however, though BleepingComputer previously reported around 4:45 a.m. ET Thursday that Bing.com turned up 429 HTTP code errors for some users.DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine that uses Bing’s API, shows an error message when users attempt a web search on a desktop browser. “We’re currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search that might prevent you from getting results,” the search engine confirmed around 4:21 a.m. ET Thursday, adding: “Thanks for your patience while we get our ducks in a row.” DuckDuckGo had just announced a number of new features Wednesday including a paid “Privacy Pro” subscription option as well as new syncing and backup features. According to DownDetector.com, thousands of users reported issues with DuckDuckGo Thursday morning. Hundreds of DownDetector users also reported issues with Bing, whose search engine appears to now be working for some users while its Bing Create, or Copilot Designer AI tool, is unavailable. Navigating to Bing.com/create presents the error message: “It’s not you, it’s us. Bing isn’t available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon.” A quick PCMag Copilot test on both a Windows 11 PC’s taskbar and on Microsoft’s Edge browser resulted in error messages stating that Copilot is “unable to connect to the service at this time.”OpenAI’s status page for ChatGPT states: “ChatGPT’s ability to search the internet is being affected,” with an additional note that the company is investigating the outage. ChatGPThas been facing error rates across its different products this week, from issues with GPT-4o on Tuesday to issues with ChatGPT on Wednesday. ChatGPT’s search is likely down Thursday because Bing is its default search experience.
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PCMag has reached out to Microsoft for comment.Editor’s Note: DownDetector is owned by ZiffDavis, PCMag’s parent company.
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