Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, isn’t working properly right now. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it seems search results are loading properly.
But this outage also appears to still be affecting Bing’s application programming interface (API), which means that other services that rely on Bing aren’t working properly.
For instance, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, two alternative search engines that rely on Bing’s search results, aren’t returning any search results right now. Microsoft Copilot isn’t loading either. ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who have the ability to perform web searches, also get an error when they try to search for something too.
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’s 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.