Can't wait to find out what happened here. This seems to be a massive outage. Interesting how fragile things become when so much technology is concentrated into just a few companies.
Genuine question, are distributed systems naturally more resilient? I can see arguments for both sides. Your point and then the hidden failure modes without central observability and ownership. Nothing exists in isolation.
DuckDuckGo was down
291–300 of 571 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#292Whats up with the 'surprised' comments about ddg? I don't like ddg myself, but it has never been a secret that they base their results on bing.
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#293I use Ecosia (which Bing powered) and wondered why it was down earlier. Makes you realise just how few players there actually are in the search rankings space.
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Windows update restarted a critical server automatically. A core service is blocked from starting by a Candy Crush ad installed by the update. The Crandy Crush ad is somehow expecting a Copilot key to be pressed on the keyboard to let the system keep going. MS engineers are waiting for an online purchase of a new $400 keyboard with the Copilot key to complete and planning to run to the data center to plug the keybo…
Very very technically, if RDP is enabled and working, this could be fixed by rdesktop-ing to the machine from a Linux box and using xdotool to experiment with typing raw keyboard scancodes through the RDP session in the hope you figure out the encoding of the Copilot key.
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not defending DDG or anyone here but it depends on the cause of the outage... is it something broken in Azure (for example) that's causing it? As has been pointed out it's still possible to search with Bing (both directly and through DDG with bangs) so it might not be as simple as you're implying.
I get here by typing a mangled version of "hacker news" into DDG. It's currently not working at all.
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#296Is it public knowledge that they use the Bing backend to do their work ?
Particularly for Bing Copilot, isn't the relationship the other way around (OpenAI has the core sauce, bing uses its API to power their copilot searches) ?
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#297Non-Google recommendations in the interim?
https://search.brave.com/ using that as my default search engine on firefox since last year. quite happy with the quality of results.
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#298Can't wait to find out what happened here. This seems to be a massive outage. Interesting how fragile things become when so much technology is concentrated into just a few companies.
Not necessarily massive. Given that Bing works again now, this seems more like an API frontend failure, or an internal routing failure at some level. Note they seem to have managed to fix the Bing frontend hours ago, but DDG is still dead in the water. Priorities... :-)
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#299Death by outsourcing.
Re: DuckDuckGo was down
#300> "Update 1: Microsoft has confirmed an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service" So not all bad then?!
I'm still unsure of what MS Copilot is. For the longest time I thought it was GH Cp because of the obvious association, but it's not. I'm assuming it's some bunk ass Bing "AI" assisted search? I truly think MS is the perfect example of a moat experiencing a drought. Unfortunately, money can't buy rain, it can only pump water from other sources. This never works.