DuckDuckGo was down

Yup, I am also running into the same issue where duck duck go is returning the error message:

> Sorry, we ran into an error displaying these results. Click here to try again.

I thought it was just duck duck go, but I tried searching with bing, and was met with:

> It's not you, it's us

> Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon.

Maybe it was acquired by Google?

If you look up "hacker news", it at least shows you an insert from the Wikipedia article, even if there are no normal results: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker+news

Presume that duckduckgo is not private or otherwise compromised.

For example many things I search trough duckduckgo later that day showed up in my twitter/x.com algorithmic feed, coincidence ? don't think so.

Or it could be that, when you search something, you also click through to some of the results, where FB/AdWords and other trackers are present.

Alternatively, there was a fallacy of human mind(forgot the name), where if you think of something, your brain will start focusing on the random occurrences of that things in all places. So, those ads were always there, your brain just started focusing suddenly on those as you were thinking of those things.

Note: Not affiliated with DDG.