Neither of those would actually answer my question.
I don’t know why there is such a strong bias here against asking around about whether something is common or widespread before entering a possibly deep time sink trying to chase something with unknown context down.
For the record no VPN, tor, or IP address change involved, and nothing like this happened to me before in over a decade of duckduckgo at work and at home.
When I tried again a few hours later, DDG worked normally for me, as it has so far, since.