Redmond’s search engine went down for half an hour on Friday

Jan 3, 2015 08:01 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft’s Bing search engine went down on Friday morning due to what seems to be a bad update rolled out by the Redmond-based software giant and which also affected a number of other services, including Yahoo Search, Windows Phone’s personal assistant Cortana, and Apple’s Siri.

Microsoft hasn’t yet detailed the issue, but Bing became unavailable worldwide on Friday, and all users who tried to access the search engine were provided with an error saying that the company was working to fix the problem.

Several other services based on Bing also went down, including Microsoft’s very own personal assistant for Windows Phone, called Cortana. On Windows Phone, Cortana uses Bing to provide search results and input to a number of requests made by the user.

Yahoo Search is also powered by Bing as part of a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, so the service also went down yesterday for approximately 30 minutes.

A number of other Microsoft services, including the Outlook.com and Hotmail.com websites, which were both down yesterday, also experienced similar problems.

Bad update said to be at fault

Details are very scarce right now, but a report published by Reuters and citing people close to the matter claims that a bad update which Microsoft tried to release yesterday was at fault for the outage.

Just after that, the “roll back procedure failed,” the same report adds, so Microsoft had no other option than to shut down a number of servers and attempt to fix the problem manually.

Connectivity issues lasted for approximately 30 minutes before access to services was restored worldwide. All of the aforementioned Microsoft and non-Microsoft services are up and working as expected right now.

Microsoft confirms the issue

Despite the fact that it refused to provide more details on what exactly caused the problem, Microsoft confirmed the outage in a very short statement but said that only some users actually experienced the connectivity issues.

“This morning, some of our customers experienced a brief, isolated services interruption which has now been resolved,” a company spokesperson said.

Microsoft’s Bing is currently the second most-used search engine in the entire world and in the United States. comScore data indicates that Bing has an approximately 20 percent market share in the search engine industry, while Google still leads the charts with a share of 67 percent.