It wasn’t just you earlier today, the built in search in Windows 10 was not working for some of the day, due to an outage on some Microsoft services. Microsoft said that earlier there was an issue “with multiple Microsoft 365 services.” with one of them being Bing.

It seems odd that the entire search system depends on the functionality of Bing, even for local searches and that if the service was down for any reason, the whole search system in Windows 10 stops working.

The issue arose at about 15:30 today here in the UK and was resolved by 16:35 UK time

One user, @ASwisstone on Twitter, pointed out as we did that the local search shouldn’t depend on Bing to be top and running.

What was the issue?

Microsoft said that a “third-party networking fiber provider” had an outage this afternoon and this had causes some issues for some Microsoft 365 services. Just earlier this week, Microsoft Teams was offline due to an SSL certificate not being renewed.