A global outage is affecting a variety of Microsoft services, including its Bing search engine and Copilot AI tool.

Users turned to social media on Thursday to complain about the outage, which is also impacting third parties, including the search engine DuckDuckGo, which relies on Microsoft’s infrastructure.

TechCentral was unable to access Bing on Thursday morning, with the website simply warning: “Hmmm … can’t reach this page.”

The Bing status page, which is meant to display the current status of the Bing search engine and its related services, returned the same error.

Copilot, the artificial intelligence chatbot build into Bing, was also down. The copilot.microsoft.com website was also inaccessible shortly after 10am SAST. ChatGPT, on which Copilot is based, was accessible.

Microsoft’s Azure status page, which shows issues impacting its Azure data centre infrastructure, was available but said there were “currently no active events”.

The problems appear to be impacting users worldwide.

Spike in complaints

Downdetector.com, a website that monitors website outages, reported a spike in complaints about Bing starting at around 7.30am SAST on Thursday. Downdetector also showed a spike in user complaints about DuckDuckGo, which is reliant on Microsoft services.

Some reports have suggested the problem could be related to the Bing API, or application programming interface, which is used by DuckDuckGo and other services.

Update: Services appeared to be returning at around 10.30am SAST, with the Bing website seemingly fully operational again. However, DuckDuckGo was still experiencing problems delivering search results as of 2.30pm SAST. The Microsoft Copilot website was also still inaccessible. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media