Bing Blackout Caused by Configuration Change

Microsoft search/decision engine wasn’t able to help users make any searches, let alone actual decisions for approximately half an hour, yesterday, December 3rd, 2009. This because the successor of Live Search suffered a blackout which locked out users worldwide completely. Microsoft was quick to identify the problem and react in order for a fix to be in place, but it still took the company over 30 minutes in order to resolve the Bing outage.

“Bing.com was down between about 6:30 and 7:00 PM Pacific Time on Dec 3, 2009. During this time, users were either unable to get to the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results page,” explained Satya Nadella, senior vice president, Online Services Division. “The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.”

Undoubtedly, judging by the sheer volume of reports that the Bing blackout generated, Microsoft’s search/decision engine has suffered an image blow. The Redmond company is laboring to position Bing as a viable alternative to Google, and the outage can only negatively impact user perception of the search services provided by Microsoft. After the problem was identified and fixed, Bing returned to running under normal parameters, and continued to do so until the time of this article.

“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,” Nadella added. “We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing. 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.”