There is absolutely no room for argument when it comes to Google’s dominance as a search platform. It is easily the most convenient, user-friendly resource out there, but many people have been flocking to alternatives like DuckDuckGo for years.
That’s largely due to some of the shadier practices going on over at Google, which many people (reasonably) believe is unabashedly stealing our information and selling it to the highest bidder. There are certainly plenty of issues going on over at Google, and each fresh hurdle that arises makes those alternatives look a little bit better. Particularly as they work to improve their search results and streamline their own processes, its getting harder and harder to beat the allure of DuckDuckGo and other alternatives.
Unfortunately, with a larger numbers of users come a larger number of problems, something DuckDuckGo is experiencing first hand. A Microsoft crash took the Google alternative down with it, leaving people who lean on the browser for their daily searches out to dry.
Is DuckDuckGo down?
A Microsoft outage hit a number of platforms in mid-May 2024, taking down ChatGPT, DuckDuckGo, and Copilot, to name a few. The issues began at around 3am EST, and caused several commonly-used resources to stop functioning. It appears to be a result of Bing’s API, which took down a number of attached services when it crashed.
Bing was among the lineup of affected resources, but it came back online long before DuckDuckGo or its peers were back to functionality. OpenAI asserted, by mid-morning on the day of the issue, that it had largely been resolved, explaining that “we experienced a partial outage affecting ChatGPT’s web-browsing capabilities due to Bing being unavailable.”
DuckDuckGo was back to full functionality at around the same time, announcing just 30 minutes ahead of OpenAI that “we’re coming back up.” During the outage, DuckDuckGo’s reliance on Bing’s search algorithms made any kind of search of the platform impossible, but anyone who was struggling with the crash should have access back by now.