• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 23, 2024

Bing’s API took down Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT’s web search in the early morning hours, as well as advertising-related services.

Microsoft acknowledged the loading issues with its Copilot service, saying in a post on X that it is working to isolate the cause of the issue.

"While we isolate the root cause, we're transitioning requests to alternate service components to expedite service recovery,” Microsoft wrote.

Microsoft Advertising services also went down. Its ad platform server status page identifies issues and shows the outage.

The issues are seen in the Web UI, Ad Insight API, Bulk API, Campaign Manager API, Custom Billing API, Custom Management API, Reporting API, and Ad Delivery API.

Many users of the services reported the services were down early Thursday. The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, which uses the Bing API, also had been affected, but has since returned online. Some DuckDuckGo users criticized the company for sending too much information to Microsoft, and relying too heavily on its search data in its query results pages.

OpenAI also has acknowledged the problem. "Between around 10:10 PM PT yesterday and 6:50 AM PT today, we experienced a partial outage affecting ChatGPT’s web-browsing capabilities due to Bing being unavailable," the company acknowledged around 8 AM pacific the services were up and running. "The issue is now resolved, and all services are operating normally."

Microsoft has yet to release an official statement about the outage other than a post on X.

The downed services come within a week of OpenAI announcing its latest technology, GPT-4o, and Microsoft announcing its latest line of Copilot+ PCs.

The outage began around 3 AM ET on Thursday, with users in Asia and Europe primarily affected by the issue.

Downdetector identified a spike in outage reports for Bing, with the number steadily declining.

Their chart shows a view of problem reports submitted in the past 24 hours compared with the typical volume of reports by time of day.