Bing's half-hour disappearing trick

Friday 04 December 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Bing, Microsoft's search engine, went off line for almost 30 minutes in the early hours of December 3. The site suffered a power outage during testing procedures and anyone who attempted to access the site during that time received an error message, although Bing Maps - which has recently been overhauled - remained operational.

In a statement, Microsoft said, "The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences."

Satya Nadella, Microsoft's Senior Vice President, Online Services Division, commented on Bing's community page, "As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com." He went on to add, "We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again."

Unsurprisingly, Twitter was buzzing with news of the failure and Bing engineer Tony Chor used the social networking site to tweet information on the progress to get the site live again.

Admittedly, the outage didn't last long, but any time off line is bad news when you are trying to win market share from a powerhouse like Google. Although Google has had a variety of service interruptions over the years, its search site itself has never suffered an outage.

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