Bing Nukes Neocities: 1.5 Million Sites Vanish From Microsoft Search, But Google Still Sees Life

The Bing Blackout: 1.5 Million Neocities Sites Disappear from Microsoft Search

The digital landscape shuddered this week as reports emerged detailing a massive, near-total disappearance of sites hosted on the independent web platform, Neocities, from Microsoft’s Bing search index. The initial unsettling realization came via community chatter, first brought to significant public attention by social media user @glenngabe on Feb 8, 2026 · 1:36 PM UTC. Users began noticing that searches directing to their personal or project sites on Neocities—a platform celebrated for empowering simple, classic web design—were yielding zero results on Bing, even when using highly specific long-tail keywords. This sudden blackout initiated a wave of confusion, as webmasters and hobbyists scrambled to determine if their sites had been maliciously taken down, had encountered a DNS failure, or if the issue lay with the search engine itself.

The scale of the observed removal was staggering, far exceeding typical index fluctuations. For a service designed to serve as an accessible home for millions of small, often non-commercial websites, being erased from one of the world’s top two search engines represents an existential threat to discoverability. The immediate uncertainty forced site owners to confront a harsh reality: their digital presence, painstakingly crafted, had seemingly vanished overnight from Microsoft’s vast algorithmic ecosystem.

Scope and Scale of the Indexing Failure

Confirmation quickly followed regarding the sheer magnitude of the Bing indexing failure. Precise counts, aggregated from Neocities community feedback and cross-referenced with historical site metrics, indicated that approximately 1.5 million individual sites hosted on the Neocities domain were no longer being recognized or served by Bing Search. This wasn't a matter of a few spammy domains being purged; it appeared to be a systemic, broad-spectrum exclusion targeting the entire subdomain structure.

Official communication from Microsoft regarding this specific, massive de-indexing event was conspicuously absent in the immediate aftermath. While Bing’s webmaster tools might flag individual sites for manual penalties, such a sweeping action usually warrants some form of public acknowledgment or documentation, yet silence reigned. Unofficial channels within the Neocities community, forums, and related social media threads became the primary source of information, propagating troubleshooting steps and expressing shared disbelief. The Neocities community, which deeply values independence and low barrier-to-entry hosting, relies heavily on broad search visibility. The sudden, unexplained exclusion from Bing severely handicapped the discovery mechanisms for a significant portion of the independent web.

Community Reaction and Workarounds

The response from the Neocities user base was swift and pragmatic. Faced with an invisible presence on Bing, the consensus quickly formed around immediate mitigation strategies. Documented advice spread rapidly: "We recommend using search engines other than Bing" became the unofficial rallying cry for affected users. This practical pivot highlighted the vulnerability inherent in relying on any single search provider for traffic.

Users attempted various troubleshooting steps, ranging from submitting corrected sitemaps via Bing Webmaster Tools to attempting to engage with Microsoft’s often opaque support structures. However, these efforts generally proved fruitless. Initial attempts to report the mass issue were met with the automated triage systems of Microsoft support, which struggled to process a failure of this magnitude, instead defaulting to generic advice applicable only to single-site indexing problems.

The Google Contrast: A Tale of Two Search Engines

The most illuminating aspect of this entire episode was the stark contrast offered by Google Search. While Bing had effectively placed Neocities into a digital black hole, Google continued to index and serve these sites flawlessly. Independent verification confirmed that queries yielding no results on Bing would return robust, fully functional links on Google.

This divergence immediately shifted the focus from "Is my site broken?" to "Why is Bing treating Neocities differently?" The analysis points toward a critical divergence in either indexing policy enforcement or the behavior of the respective web crawlers (bots). Google’s apparent indifference to the Neocities structure suggests that their algorithms did not flag the entire platform for violation, whereas Bing’s seemingly scorched-earth approach implies a sweeping algorithmic trigger was pulled against the hosting environment itself.

For webmasters, this incident serves as a potent, real-time lesson in search engine diversification. Relying predominantly on Bing for referral traffic, even if organic growth was steady, suddenly proved disastrous when the platform made an uncommunicated unilateral decision. The digital ecosystem thrives on redundancy, and this event underscored the danger of concentrating visibility efforts in one place.

Failed Support Channels and AI Bot Inefficacy

The frustrations surrounding the incident were compounded by the notoriously difficult experience of seeking redress through Microsoft’s official support infrastructure. Numerous users reported detailing the 1.5 million site issue only to be funneled into automated support pipelines.

The inefficacy of these channels was a major talking point. AI support bots, designed to handle routine indexing requests, proved incapable of recognizing or escalating an issue of this systemic scope. Responses were frequently unhelpful, suggesting standard fixes like clearing cache or checking robots.txt files—solutions irrelevant to a platform-wide de-indexing event confirmed by external search engine analysis. This technological failure to address a massive user impact left many feeling abandoned by the platform provider.

Potential Causes and Future Outlook

Speculation regarding the root cause of the Bing Blackout is rampant within the web development community. Was this a swift, albeit heavy-handed, manual block implemented by a policy team responding to an unpublicized internal report? Or was it an algorithmic glitch—a faulty heuristic in Bing’s spam detection that mistakenly flagged the characteristics common to Neocities sites (such as simple HTML structures or shared IP ranges)?

Algorithm vs. Policy

The question boils down to Algorithm vs. Policy. A policy enforcement action implies intent and a specific target, perhaps related to terms of service violations that went unreported. An algorithmic failure, however, suggests an overzealous bot or a poorly calibrated safety measure that swept up millions of benign sites in its net. Given the speed and totality of the removal, many lean toward an overly aggressive algorithmic sweep that bypassed traditional human review checkpoints.

This incident carries significant weight in the context of search engine history. We have seen past instances where major index purges have occurred, often requiring lengthy negotiation to reverse. However, the sheer size and the specific hosting target (an independent, creator-focused service) raise concerns about how major search providers view and police small-scale, creative hosting environments moving forward.

What this means for the long-term relationship between independent web hosting and major search providers is a deepening sense of precariousness. If 1.5 million sites can be rendered invisible overnight without warning or accessible recourse, the promise of an open, decentralized web feels increasingly fragile. Creators are left to wonder which platform they can trust to respect their indexing presence, reinforcing the need for decentralized, non-search-dependent traffic generation methods.

Source:

• @glenngabe (Posted Feb 8, 2026 · 1:36 PM UTC)