Microsoft blocks millions of websites. The reason is bizarre

He wanted to save the spirit of 90s websites from oblivion, and meanwhile millions of such domains were blocked… The official reason? Suspicious activity.

It was 2013, and Kyle Drake had a brilliant idea to keep the spirit of the 90s internet alive. So he founded the Neocities network of portals, which allows you to create free websites completely to your taste. Most importantly, there are no top-down templates in this system, so it is a great tool for creating websites with unique niches. At the same time, you can add many elements that are seen from today’s perspective as relics, but give them a “retro” character, e.g. buttons with animated GIFs that activate when you hover over them and many others.

And everything was going quite well for a long time – as many as 1.5 million websites were created within Neocities. Meanwhile, one day in January 2026, suddenly all of them stopped being visible in the search engine… Not in Google, but in… Bing, but we are still talking about a tool used by 4.5% of Internet users.

Drake knew something was wrong when he noticed Bing visitors dropping from half a million a day to… zero. He reported the issue to Microsoft using Bing’s webmaster tools, weeks passed… and all attempts at communication were unsuccessful. Dozens of submitted requests, attempts to contact the chatbot to connect it with a consultant and… nothing. At one point he even wanted to buy ads so that someone from the advertising department would help him with it. The problem is that the entire contact line via Bing is fully automated, which makes it easy to get stuck in a difficult situation. Only after Ars Technica asked Microsoft for comment, the company removed many of the sites blocked in search.

According to the portal, Microsoft was removing some Neocities pages from search results because they fell within the criteria of “very low quality pages.” The company did not specify which specific sites these were, but it also did not respond to Drake. Moreover, not all Neocities sites happened to violate these criteria. Microsoft’s advice to Drake? Contact Microsoft directly. It’s a bit of a hit, because Microsoft is ignoring a report that has been submitted on this matter for some time now.

The problem may be twofold – either the sites are still blocked, or it takes a long time to reindex them in Bing.

Drake tried to settle the matter quietly, in a human manner – “let’s come to an agreement, fix it and move on.” But since Bing remained silent, he had no choice but to warn users that the situation was becoming not only absurd, but even dangerous.
In his blog post, he revealed that Bing not only blocked all Neocities subdomains, but also displayed a suspicious website impersonating Neocities on the first page of results. So it’s a classic: real content in the trash, phishing on top.

After several complaints, Microsoft graciously removed the fake, but did not lift the block. What’s worse – he didn’t give any specific reason. And since “it’s easier to break through a blocked site than an unlocked one,” Drake warned that it’s only a matter of time before something suspicious appears in the results again.

Google? Zero problems. Everybody else? They don’t block either. Only Bing makes Neocities an invisible city. So Drake reached the point he desperately wanted to avoid: he called on users to boycott Bing and all search engines based on his data until the matter is resolved.

Because today it looks like this – if you use Bing, no Neocities site will appear in the results, regardless of quality, originality or compliance with the rules. And if something does appear, it is most likely not Neocities, but another phishing scam.

Drake emphasizes that this is not about any rebellion against Microsoft – on the contrary, he has been trying to settle the matter quietly for months. But when a platform that hosts 1.46 million pages and 13 billion visits suddenly disappears from the search engine, and technical support only responds automatically, this silence begins to harm ordinary people who do not even know that their pages have become invisible.

Worst of all, Drake couldn’t find a single example of content that could trigger such a drastic ban. Moderation works – problematic pages are removed within 24 hours, and the domain provider requires a response within 48 hours. Microsoft claims that it fights phishing, scraping and “junk text”, but did not specify any specifics.

Meanwhile, even iconic, long-standing websites – such as “Wired Sound for Wired People”, known all over the Internet – have disappeared from Bing, although Google shows them in the first place.
Drake summed it up quite bitterly: Neocities has “one of the lowest ratios of crap to valuable content on the entire Internet,” and yet creators who make unique, human-made sites don’t exist in Windows’ default search engine.