Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo!'s search engine blacked out for a short while on Jan. 2 after Microsoft rolled out a string of bad code that it had difficulty pulling back.
The few people who rely on Bing and Yahoo! for search have taken to Twitter to express their discontent or amusement about the outage.
@Bing is down, which means @Yahoo search is also borked. Internet is crickets. Insert @google in this sentence and internet is PANIC!!
— Sara Yates (@TheDailySara) January 2, 2015
Until I looked up Yahoo Search being down, I had no idea they don't do search anymore. Search powered by Bing. Who? — Stefan Lubinski (@stefanlubinski) January 2, 2015
Thankfulness: Without Twitter, I would never have known Bing or Yahoo search were down. — Simon Phipps (@webmink) January 2, 2015
Whoa, down for desktop too. Not a good way to start the year RT @WithinRafael Couldn't search on my phone, turns out Bing is down. Yikes. — Mike Becker (@85_Driver) January 2, 2015
@Yahoo search is down and out too. @bing What is happening? This is not good at all!!
— A Believer (@Agatharchos) January 2, 2015
Website monitoring service downdetector.com says the Yahoo! outage took place at around 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday. Users who perform a search on Yahoo! are normally redirected to search.yahoo.com for the results. However, those who were affected by the blackout were either left with an empty page or a message saying Yahoo! is working on the problem.
"Yahoo! will be right back," said the page. "Thank you for your patience."
A spokesperson for Yahoo! confirmed that it was experiencing technical problems, but the website is now back online. Other Yahoo! services, such as Yahoo! Mail and Flickr, appear unaffected.
The Yahoo! outage follows an earlier loss of service by Bing, which has also bounced back following issues caused by problematic engineering. Microsoft has confirmed Bing's blackout.
"This morning, some of our customers experienced a brief, isolated services interruption, which has now been resolved," a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters.
According to website IsItDownRightNow.com, Bing was unreachable for some 20 minutes or so, with users complaining that the search engine was not responding at all or redirecting to the home page of Microsoft's Internet Information Services.
Some users have also reported that other Microsoft websites, including live.com, outlook.com, hotmail.com and portal.office.com, were also unavailable. The websites are currently working as of press time and website monitoring services do not show a disruption in their records except for live.com and hotmail.com, which saw a loss of service at around the same time Bing was down.
While it is easy to conclude that the outage was caused by hackers attacking the search engines, it wasn't. Reuters cites a person familiar with the workings of Microsoft who says the issue was caused by a string of bad code pushed by Microsoft's engineers to Bing.
The problem was further exacerbated when Microsoft was unable to roll back the code successfully, forcing its engineers to shut down its linked servers and revert back to a time when everything was running smoothly.
Following Microsoft's blunder, Yahoo! faced difficulty handling the amount of searches coming in from a backlog that piled up during the time Bing was unavailable.
Yahoo!'s search service is powered by Microsoft's Bing under a 10-year agreement forged by the two companies in 2009. The outage should spell annoyance particularly for users of Mozilla's Firefox browser, which recently ended its partnership with Google as the default search engine on the browser and opted for Yahoo! instead.
