Often the case with US-based companies that have outages during "office hours in Europe". We, europeans see it going down. Communication on why, how and ETAs only appear at the start of the US day.

This take implies there is no on-call rotation at DDG, which I find suspicious

the most important function of on call rotation is there to fix problems, not to make announcements to the public. so they surely have the first, but maybe not the second.

Well, maybe that perspective explains why it takes 6+ hours to update any status page then: "welp, shit's broke, better wait for the management team to wake up to tell anyone"

more like: wait for them to decide exactly how to present this to the public.

This is incorrect, the primary job of an on-call rotation is to satisfy customers.

It’s usually much better ROI to publicly acknowledge an issue if the resolution is not going to be single digit minutes, as it massively reduces the incoming query/support burden

yes, but the users of the search engine are not the customers. actually, who would the customers of ddg be?

ad agencies? are they going to get upset if their ads are not visible for a few hours on of many sites where they post them? are they even going to notice?

DDG has a global remote workforce so this wouldn't seem to apply in their case.

(just guessing) the directors might be in US though

My company has a global remote workforce. The only team of which that owns any infrastructure being the team I am on, and all of my peers on that team being based in various parts of the US. So it’s not as simple maybe as you might think.

DDG has relatively large pool of European employees.

They should put an if results = 0 then post helpful message instead of try broken search again?