
DuckDuckGo was down - AlphaWeaver
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hacker+news
======
AdamSC1
Hey folks - we're back in business. Clearly Dax the Duck had a case of the
Mondays!

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bcaa7f3a8bbc
I'd love to read a post-mortem.

~~~
pwned1
Sometimes ducks just have a bad day.

~~~
gnicholas
Some days you’re the jet engine; some days you’re the duck.

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louismerlin
And it's back, after 10 minutes. Nice job to the response team, that was fast
!

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jackdecker
All I know is that I would not want to be the one who had last committed to
production.

~~~
cvik
Good teams don't blame individuals. You can praise individuals, but you take
blame as a team.

Hopefully at least two people reviewed the commit before it was put into
production. Someone set up the post-launch smoke-tests/api-test-suits. Someone
built the CI/CD-system. Etc etc.

My point is, it is rarely a single individuals fault when something at this
scale goes down.

~~~
godelski
I also think a lot of praise should generally be a team thing too (but I also
love this: "You can praise individuals, but you take blame as a team.")

When discussing success to an outside group (giving a presentation or
something) or higher up (especially here!) you always use "we". Even if it is
a section that only you worked on or you did most of the work. You can often
pick out good managers by just seeing if they talk like this, if their focus
is around what they individually did or what their team accomplished.

My point is, it is rarely a single individual's success when things work.

~~~
nitrogen
I also really like it when managers mention significant individuals (as
suggested by the phrasing that started this thread), as long as everyone on
the team is getting mention-worthy projects. Both group and individual
recognition, as long as it's fairly used.

~~~
godelski
Yes, exactly. I don't want to downplay the importance of praising individuals,
but at the same time I don't want it to shadow praising teams.

There's a balance and I do think we tend to focus on the individual as a
society. We can only climb mountains by standing on the shoulders of giants.
One person gets to the peak and we should praise them for that, but we
shouldn't ignore their foundation either (which I think currently happens).
E.G. Kepler was an essential part of science and needs to be recognized, but
if it wasn't for the work that Tycho Brahe did, Kepler's achievements couldn't
exist. The "single person" mentality ignores the importance of the
foundational work that needed to be done and frequently causes many to feel
that they are not achieving simply because they are working in these roles,
which are essential.

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crawlcrawler
Image and video search works. Regular text search, maps and news are down. Did
they forget to bay their Bing bill?

EDIT: scratch that. DDG is back in business again. I would love to read a
post-mortem.

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subins2000
Do they still use Bing ? I thought DDG had in-house search db.

~~~
crawlcrawler
The Duck Duck Bot crawls the web in some fashion but it is my understanding
most of what's in their search result comes from their Bing indices. Correct
me if I'm wrong.

~~~
AntiqueFig
Afaik, it's still mostly from Bing.

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longhairedhippy
Came here to see if I was crazy. Should be an interesting post-mortem, I
wonder if someone dropped the production database...

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baddox
Autocomplete in the search bar still works, so there’s some data out there.

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matt-attack
I would have thought that the type of person compelled to use DDG, would
disable autocomplete.

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yjftsjthsd-h
It really depends. On the continuum of "I don't care about privacy" to
"borderline paranoid", there's certainly a middle ground of "I don't trust
Google but do trust DDG to not record every keystroke I send and add it to my
profile forever" that would be happy to enable autocomplete if it was going to
a search engine with a meaningful privacy stance.

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kerng
Probably an operational issue, like an expired internal certificate I'd
imagine. Very curious to see the post morten and root cause analysis.

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oneplane
Image search still works for me. Odd.

Edit: strike that, only for some entries. Must be some cache?

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raegis
It still works if you're hungry:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=food&ia=recipes](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=food&ia=recipes)

~~~
leesalminen
Haha, I was also searching "food" to see no results and just started seeing
recipe results returned.

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bearcherian
Changing the time range to "Past Month" yields results

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libeclipse
Can confirm.

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tiborsaas
It looks ok to me:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nothing&t=hk&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nothing&t=hk&ia=web)

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lukeqsee
Can confirm, from Switzerland.

I was quite confused why my query for a well-known brand name was returning
nothing. Bang queries still work.

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pluc
Even the conversion magic doesn't work (eg "1cm in inches") which one would
assume is a separate system

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perryprog
As well as bangs, which give a different error saying to email
ops@duckduckgo.com.

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ajb
Oops, not fun. I think they must have been having problems for a while, I
recently switched to try qwant because DDG was frequently slow to respond, but
it was still working...

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dsparkman
I know I was freaking out and had to use Google directly. :)

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Knuthtruth
It's back up now. Should know soon why it was down

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madnat
Seems like other type of searches (images) still work.

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chanmad29
It is just the "All" and maps tabs that are not returning anything as of now.
News/images/videos are still working.

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designium
Possible issues:

\- It could be an issue with DNS servers \- Certificates that got expired \-
Latest push to production that got wrong \- DDoS attack

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chadlavi
Wow, they must be having a pretty bad morning

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adnanaga
Recipe results are still coming through

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dontspeak
What a tough time for the devs. Troubleshooting at such a scale must be a
nightmare

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mikekoscinski
Came here to say this. Still broken for me. "NPR" was last query.

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orliesaurus
It's working again! But wow, that was quite an interesting 9 minutes!

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IceWreck
I had this issue one time, and it got fixed when I reloaded the page.

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phantarch
Interestingly it looks like image search is still working though

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kerpele
Works again. I wonder if the fix was just rebooting a server

~~~
designium
Normally that does the trick, but it doesn't tell what went wrong so it could
repeat again.

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totaldude87
wow, they are third in search engine usage, not sure whats going on!

[EDIT] removed the metrics due to downvotes! check below for traffic
information and how much is lost..

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sn_master
where did you get this number from?

~~~
totaldude87
[https://duckduckgo.com/traffic](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic) June 2020
Daily Average 62,489,472

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wilfredk
Has this ever happened with another large search engine?

~~~
drocer88
Yes. : [https://www.cnet.com/news/google-goes-down-for-5-minutes-
int...](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-goes-down-for-5-minutes-internet-
traffic-drops-40/)

"Google suffered an outage late on Friday night, though you might not have
noticed -- it only went down for five minutes. During that brief window,
Internet traffic around the world dropped by a massive 40 per cent, according
to Web analytics firm GoSquared, Sky News Online reports. "

Bing also:
[https://www.pcworld.com/article/183770/bings_30_minute_outag...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/183770/bings_30_minute_outage_a_sally_field_moment.html)

"Microsoft's Bing search engine was offline for about 30 minutes on Thursday
evening."

Qwant also: [https://blog.qwant.com/qwants-unprecedented-service-
failure-...](https://blog.qwant.com/qwants-unprecedented-service-failure-our-
apologies-and-thanks/)

"Qwant’s infrastructure broke down around 12.00 UTC, and the service could
only be restablished hours later, around midnight"

~~~
woodrowbarlow
also a case in 2009 when google flagged all search results as malware for 55
minutes: [https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/31/google-flags-whole-
interne...](https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/31/google-flags-whole-internet-as-
malware/)

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TriNetra
Fixed now it seems

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saagarjha
I wonder if they have a status page?

~~~
lenwood
I tried to find one. The closest I came is their Traffic dashboard [1], which
is updated daily. I also checked their Twitter account [2] but no mention of
problems yet.

[1]: [https://duckduckgo.com/traffic](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic) [2]:
[https://twitter.com/duckduckgo](https://twitter.com/duckduckgo)

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mcjiggerlog
Looks like it's back up now!

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canjoe
fixed

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pandey_
now it's good. It's searching.

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crobertsbmw
They're back. So that lasted about 4 minutes..

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dgellow
Still broken for me.

~~~
sn_master
same, still broken.

