Bing’s API has stopped working, disabling Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT web search features

Microsoft’s Bing search engine malfunctioned for several hours in Europe on Thursday. At first we noticed that internet searches were not possible at all. The search results appear to be loading correctly.

This outage also affected the Bing Application Programming Interface (API), which means that other services that use Bing did not work properly.

The incident appeared to end around 7:20 a.m. Pacific time, and services began operating again after an outage of more than five hours.

For example, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, two alternative search engines that use Bing search results, returned no search results. Microsoft Copilot also did not load. ChatGPT Plus subscribers who have the ability to search online also received an error when trying to search for something.

Once again, the failure proves that the network is dependent on several technology companies. If the API goes down, multiple services will be affected.

In this particular case, it was interesting to observe the increasing role of Bing’s API. Although Google still dominates Internet search, many services now rely on the Bing API.

Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment on the outage.