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...
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