Microsoft has issued a public apology for the problems that affected its Live Search Cashback program on Black Friday. Customers attempting to take advantage of a range of discounts synonymous with the start of the 2009 holiday season were frustrated by glitches associated with Live Search Cashback. Not only was the service down for a good part of the day, but additional functionality issues caused customers to receive erroneous cashback amounts in their accounts, in contrast to what they were promised. Microsoft claims that it has dealt with the problems, and that it will make good with the customers who got stuck with cashback amounts inferior to the special offers.

“We want to respond to those of you who've commented about your problems using cashback last Friday. For a few hours on Friday, November 28, Live Search cashback experienced an unexpected outage. If you completed a purchase that day, you can follow up on a cashback rebate by contacting Microsoft at https://support.search.live.com/. Be sure to have the order number and the email address provided for the transaction,” explained Rajat Taneja, general manager, Worldwide Commercial Search.

According to the Redmond company, the blackout was generated by a high spike in traffic along with a technical glitch. The Live Search Cashback failure to deliver on a joint Microsoft and HP promotion, which advertised a cashback amount of up to 40%, is standing out among the problems. Customers that got past the outage and the site's crawling performance received only a 3% cashback. Microsoft promised that it would return the proper amounts of money to customers.

“Here are the details about Friday's outage: a significant spike in traffic caused the system to go down for several hours on Friday; the downtime was partly related to investigating the issue and partly to rebuilding and redeploying the databases and indexes that support Microsoft Live Search cashback; the issues that caused Friday's problem have been resolved. We're confident we won't have further problems,” Taneja added.