Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was working improperly for several hours on Thursday in Europe. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it seems search results are loading properly.
This outage also affected Bing’s application programming interface (API), which means that other services that relied on Bing weren’t working properly.
The incident seemed to end around 7.20 a.m. PT, and services began coming back online after more than five hours of outage.
Those affected included DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, two alternative search engines that rely on Bing’s search results. Microsoft Copilot wasn’t loading either. ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who have the ability to perform web searches, also got an error when they tried to search for something.
Once again, an outage proves the web depends on a handful of tech companies. If an API goes down, many services are affected.
In this particular case, it was interesting to see the increasingly important role of Bing’s API. While Google still dominates when it comes to web search, many services are now reliant on Bing’s API.
Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment on the outage.
