Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, experienced issues for several hours in Europe on Thursday. Initially, web searches were not possible at all, but now search results are loading correctly.

This outage also affected Bing’s API, causing disruptions to other services that depend on Bing.

The issue appeared to be resolved around 7:20 am Pacific Time, with services gradually coming back online after more than five hours of downtime.

For example, alternative search engines DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, which rely on Bing for search results, were unable to return any search results. Microsoft Copilot was also not functioning, and ChatGPT Plus subscribers encountered errors when attempting to perform web searches.

Once again, this outage highlights how the web is dependent on a few tech companies. When an API goes down, it impacts numerous services.

In this case, Bing’s API played a crucial role, despite Google's dominance in web search. Many services now rely on Bing’s API for their operations.

Microsoft was not immediately available for comment on the outage.