Google Search, the search engine titan of the web, is dominating by huge margin. Nothing comes close.
Even when they all join forces, working in tandem to defeat the giant, their efforts are miniscule, and kind of irrelevant.
Bing from Microsoft, is the second largest search engine of the web. It's large enough to be considered a rival, simply because it relies on its own resources, not others, to provide its services. And doing so, means that it provides support for others, allowing third-parties to rely on its resources.
And this time, Bing API was down, crippling a lot of services that use the API.
From Microsoft's own Copilot that was inaccessible, ChatGPT search, Yahoo!, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo - similarly failed.
The outage began around 3 AM ET on May 23, 2024. Users in Asia and Europe appear to be the ones primarily affected by the issue.
"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. More information can be found in the admin center under CP795190," said the Microsoft 365 Status account on X (formerly Twitter).
We're aware of and investing reported issues accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center. We'll provide more information within the next thirty minutes.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) May 22, 2024
In order to fix the issue sooner, Microsoft said that it was isolating the root cause, and transitioned requests to alternate service components.
The company then broadened its mitigation efforts following signs of partial recovery for Copilot and other features.
The whole mitigation process commenced for about a full day, before Microsoft confirmed that all Copilot features returned online.
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. More information can be found in the admin center under CP795190.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) May 23, 2024
Outages like this happen from time to time. And tech giants can also fall as victims.
However, they rarely last this long.
And as if adding salt to the wound, the issue at the Bing API happened at the most unfortunate moment for Microsoft, because the company had two major events this week, including the unveiling of its Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7 on Monday then held its annual Build conference over the following two days.
The events sprung Microsoft into the spotlight, so its services having outages don't translate well to its business.
Fortunately, the outage didn't affect other services or sites, like the more critical cloud service Azure, for example.
This is because the fallout of the cloud service would be much more significant because lots of popular websites and apps require said services to operate.
We've completed the mitigations, and our telemetry has confirmed that all Copilot features are functioning as expected. More information can be found in the admin center under CP795190.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) May 24, 2024
As for Google, during the time Microsoft battled against time to make its API online, the consistently dominating search platform remained speedy and accessible, just like ever.
The last time Google experienced outage, happened on August 9, 2022.
At the time, the outage caused widespread disruption, affecting users globally, causing significant issues with accessing search results.
From Google Search, Maps, Drive and YouTube, were all down, returning HTTP 500 and HTTP 502 errors.
The issue lasted minutes, but it led to broader issues with search quality and indexing, which persisted for some time afterwards.
After their services went back online, Google apologized and stated that a software update issue was to blame.
