Microsoft’s Bing went down for a half hour
Microsoft’s Bing search engine suffered an outage on Thursday night, but the silver lining is that people actually seemed to care.
Bing, the newest search engine effort from Microsoft, has been gaining some strength in the search engine market, but it hasn’t exactly taken the space by storm. On Thursday evening, the site became unresponsive for most users from 6:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Those that could get to the site received incomplete search results.
The good news for Microsoft in all of this was that it actually appeared users cared that the site was down. An odd badge of honor to be sure, but it brings to mind the old adage, “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, it made a sound, so people were there to hear it.
According to the Bing blog, the outage was caused by some changes to configurations during internal testing. As one commenter on the blog post correctly pointed out, shouldn’t you do testing on a server other than your actual production servers? In other words, when you are a major company, testing new features or settings on the server that your actual users access doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
While a half hour may not seem like all that long, when you are a major service, it can be a lifetime, but all ended well with the service coming back up again for use. The one unintentional funny moment of this whole thing was in the blog post explanation:
The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.
Really? Causing your site to go down was an unintended consequence? Thanks for making sure we knew that! I thought for sure you’d done this on purpose.
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