Microsoft Bing Outage is Impacting Copilot, DuckDuckGo, And Other Services

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is currently experiencing an outage that’s also affecting other services relying on the Bing API. Microsoft acknowledged the outage earlier this morning which is also impacting the company’s Copilot chatbot.

“We’re investigating an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service. We’re working to isolate the cause of the issue,” the company said three hours ago. In a more recent update posted an hour ago, Microsoft explained that it has isolated the root cause and taken appropriate measures to bring Bing back online.

While we isolate the root cause, we're transitioning requests to alternate service components to expedite service recovery. More information can be found in the admin center under CP795190.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) May 23, 2024

As of this writing, your experience with Bing and Copilot may vary. DuckDuckGo, which uses Bing as one of its sources to provide search results is also affected by the outage. OpenAI also said that ChatGPT’s ability to search the Internet via Bing (a feature that requires a ChatGPT Plus subscription) was also being impacted.

This is quite a bad timing for this Bing outage, which happens right during Microsoft’s AI-focused Build developer conference. And while it’s still easy to dismiss Bing as an also-ran service, this latest outage shows that despite its tiny market share compared to Google, Bing and the Bing API have actually become a key part of the Internet today.