Article by George Norman

On 04 Dec 2009

On the 3rd of December, the current year, Microsoft’s decision engine Bing suffered an outage. During this outage, which lasted between 6:30 and 7:00PM Pacific Time, users were either unable to access Bing.com or they could access but, but received incomplete results to their search queries. If you experienced this yourself, the Redmond-based software giant now explains why Bing went down.

“The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences. 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,” explained Senior Vice President, Online Services Division, Satya Nadella.


Satya Nadella went on to explain that Bing strives to maintain a high standard of operational excellence and that the Bing team is running a post mortem to uncover the ways in which Bing’s software and processes need to be improved so as to prevent an incident like this one from happening in the future.

In related news, Microsoft hired a research firm to find out if Google users stick with Google out of loyalty or if they use Google because there is no other search engine to fill its shoes. So the firm recruited 15 Google users and told them to use Bing and only Bing for a period of 1 week. Oh, these Google users were not informed the study was sponsored by Microsoft. After the week passed, the research firm asked the 15 Google users if they will keep using Google or if they will switch over to Bing. 5 said they’ll stick with Google; the other 10 said they’ll switch to Bing.

Clips from this study are available on Bing’s YouTube channel here.



Tags: Microsoft, Bing, Search Engine, Decision Engine

I Hope you LIKE this blog post! Thank you!

What do YOU have to say about this

Popular News

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.