Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, faced operational issues for several hours on Thursday in Europe. Initially, users were unable to perform any web searches, but it appears that search results have since resumed loading correctly.

This outage also impacted Bing’s application programming interface (API), affecting other services dependent on Bing’s functionality.

The incident appeared to resolve around 7:20 a.m. PT, with services gradually coming back online after more than five hours of downtime.

The outage affected alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, both of which rely on Bing for search results. Additionally, Microsoft Copilot was non-functional during this period. ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who have access to web search capabilities, also encountered errors when attempting to conduct searches.

Once again, an outage highlights how much the web relies on a small number of tech companies. When an API goes down, it can disrupt numerous services.

In this instance, the outage underscored the growing significance of Bing's API. While Google continues to dominate the web search market, many services have become increasingly dependent on Bing's API.

Microsoft could not be reached for immediate comment regarding the outage.