Bing dies, nobody notices and fewer care

Davey Winder
Saturday, 05 December 2009 15:12

Your IT - Home IT

Did you know that the Microsoft Bing search engine died this week? Don't panic, you are not alone.

Google is probably breathing a sigh of relief this week after arch rivals and search engine wannabe Microsoft suffered a 45 minute outage with Bing and nobody even noticed it was down.

Well, I say nobody but I mean nobody that really matters. By which I mean users, you know, the folk who are actually searching for stuff. The media noticed. Oh boy did the media notice. Reports of the downtime were all over the place.

Indeed it was these reports, retweeted on Twitter, that first drew my attention to the fact that Microsoft had managed to somehow update the live Bing site with configuration changes that were meant to be confined to a test environment only.

I then found an official explanation from Satya Nadella, a Senior Vice President, with the Microsoft Online Services Division, which explained "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".

Microsoft says the search site was down for 30 mins, one user who did spot it reckons it was 45 mins. But to be honest it could have been 12 hours and I'm still not sure anyone would have cared.

Feeling out of the loop a little I asked my colleagues if they had been inconvenienced by the Bing downtime and the responses I got varied from "was it down, really, oh when" to "Bing, what's that?" neither of which are exactly encouraging for Microsoft.

I asked my geeky mates in Australia the same question, and none of them had been aware of the downtime until Twitter mentioned it. None of them use Bing on a regular basis, it would seem.

Following this incident I'm not sure I blame them. Can you imagine the chaos if Google search went off the air for half an hour, caused by some noob pressing the wrong button? Microsoft says it strives "to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing" but this incident would suggest it needs to strive harder.

30 mins or more to get a system back up and running, have they no failover strategy or was this it? Almost as bad, so I am told, there was no custom error message just a plain vanilla http 500 code.

The only people who did notice would appear to be the Americans, where Bing is the third most popular search engine with around 10% market share. I wouldn't be surprised if it slips back as they migrate back to Google after this fiasco though.

What with the recent story, as reported here on iTWire , about Microsoft setting the lawyers on a chap who found a costly security hole in Bing it seems that Microsoft really is losing the plot here.