Microsoft’s mistaken Bing update takes down Yahoo search

You might not have noticed since it was Friday afternoon immediately after a holiday when most people are still on vacation into the weekend, but both Bing and Yahoo search engines went down for a few hours. The good news is that the downtime didn’t last long, and wasn’t the result of some nefarious hackers’ campaign to disrupt our lives. It was actually just an accident caused by a bad update from Microsoft to the Bing engine, and since Yahoo’s search is powered by Bing, it was interesting example of the domino effect among internet giants.

If you’re a Bing or Yahoo user reading this, fear not, as service to both sites was restored at around 5:00 pm PT on Friday. But if you were trying to use Yahoo search during the few hours before that time, all you saw on your screen was a message that engineers were working to fix the problem.

Reuters reported that immediately after Microsoft realized the mistake with the Bing update it tried to roll back, but that didn’t fix the issue. As a result, they had to turn off select servers to restore things to the way they were before the crash. Other Microsoft services were affected by the downtime, including Hotmail and Outlook.com. On Yahoo’s end, it appears only search was disrupted, as Yahoo Mail and Flickr’s site had no apparent difficulties.

Outside the realm of desktop search, users also reported that smartphone digital assistants Cortana and Siri were affected in some situations. As is the norm these days, many Bing and Yahoo users went to Twitter to post their frustrations, seemingly forgetting about the other big search engine whose name starts with the letter G.

VIA Mashable

SOURCE Reuters