DuckDuckGo goes offline in India; privacy-focused search engine in talks with ISPs to resolve issue

Privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo is not working in India, which the company said was not due to any technical glitch on its part and was talking to internet servcie providers in the country to resolve it.

“To our users in India: We’ve received many reports our search engine is unreachable by much of India right now and have confirmed it is not due to us,” DuckDuckGo wrote in a tweet.

DuckDuckGo has emerged as the second most used search engine in the world after Google, due to its focus on privacy. The search engine says it doesn’t collect any personal information on those who use it. It also doesn’t throw up the IP address of the user. DuckDuckGo is increasingly popular among users who do not want to have their searches online traced.

” We’re actively talking to Internet providers to get to the bottom of it ASAP. Thank you for your patience,” the search engine tweeted. It provided an alternate.

In the meantime it appears switching to a third-party DNS provider fixes the issue, e.g. the more private 1.1.1.1, it tweeted. DNS is domain name system that allows web browsers access a particular site on the internet.