Did anyone notice?
Microsoft has confirmed that it's search engine Bing.com
was down for half an hour with users were either unable to get to the site, or
their queries were returning incomplete results page.
Apparently the cause of the outage was a configuration
change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended
consequences. A spokesman for Microsoft said that as soon as the
problem was noticed 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.
The outage came just a day after Microsoft announced a
variety of changes to Bing, including added detail for some results and
improved mapping tricks so we guess the changes must have come as a result of
those upgrades.
On the bonus side people actually noticed that Bing was
down. Many people think that Microsoft's search engine is largely ignored despite
Redmond's large advertising campaign.
