I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
My guess is it was the situation where DDG couldn’t block Microsoft trackers in their tracking blocker applications (their browser and browser extension and not the search itself), because of the contract they had with Microsoft to use the bing search index for DDG search. I believe the problem was resolved, and never affected the search itself.