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.
wait, if you typed that into DDG and it brought you here, then how is it not working? if that's not what you meant, you worded your "DDG is not working at all, so I jumped onto HN to look for a thread about it" comment very strangely
Nobody was being pedantic. I don't use the web that way. I never type into a search engine the domain of a site I want to go to, so that's just totally odd to me. I'm of an age where we actually know what a domain is, and do not use the web like it is AOL keywords. Especially when >90% of the time, you just tack on a .com to your keywords to find the actual website.
> I never type into a search engine the domain of a site I want to go to
I think the plurality, if not majority, of people use a browser configured such that the URL bar is automatically a search engine if it doesn't recognize the URL.