Major search engines and AI tools suffer outages

Several search engines and AI tools experienced an outage on Thursday morning.

Search engines that experienced outages include Microsoft's Bing search engine and DuckDuckGo. Similarly, AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT's internet search also experienced an outage.

By 6:30 am ET, users in the US reported that DuckDuckGo and Microsoft's AI Copilot were still unavailable. By this time, Bing's website had become functional and started displaying search results. Yet, some users encountered 429 HTTP code errors as early as 4:45 am ET.

DuckDuckGo showed an error message as users attempted a web search in a desktop browser. Acknowledging the issue, the search engine said, "We're currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search that might prevent you from getting results. Thanks for your patience while we get our ducks in a row." 

The DuckDuckGo search engine experienced an outage after it announced new features on Wednesday. Its update included a paid "Privacy Pro" subscription option and new syncing and backup features. 

Thousands of users reported issues with DuckDuckGo. Hundreds of users reported issues with Bing as well. Bing's search engine continued to work for some users, but the Bing Create or Copilot Designer AI tool remained unavailable, according to DownDetector website.

Expressing concern over the outage, OpenAI's status page for ChatGPT said that the service was investigating the outage issue, which affected ChatGPT's ability to search the internet. ChatGPT has faced issues across its products this week, including problems with GPT-4o on Tuesday and ChatGPT on Wednesday.