back to article Ugly Microsoft code NUKED Bing and Yahoo! – report

Microsoft and Yahoo!'s search engines may hold much smaller portions of the market, which is dominated by ad giant Google, but netizens still noticed when the services went dark for a short period on Friday. Reuters, citing a person briefed on the outages, reported today that the search engines went titsup after Redmond …

  1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Windows

    Ach so!

    Yep, I noticed Office 365 was not exactly responsive on Friday, presenting you with a white page, although it was labeled as being "up" by isitdownrightnow, though with ~150ms response time.

    Luckily the office looked like someone had fired a neutron bomb a kilometer above the city.

  2. chivo243 Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Dodgy Microsoft Code

    Somehow sounds redundant to me... However, I don't use Yahoo! or (bada)Bing! Have been trying to use duck,duck go for searches...

  3. RISC OS

    I guess

    the 2 or 3 people who use bing and yahoo to search are relieved that the drama is over!

    1. cambsukguy

      Re: I guess

      Bing + Yahoo has over 20% of search in the US, slightly more than 2 or 3 people, in fact it is over 65 million people since I imagine close to 100% of 316 million people use search. More than the population of the UK.

      Stop being a prick you prick and learn to count or at least surmise.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I guess

        Stop being a prick you prick and learn to count or at least surmise.

        Get a sense of humour.

        1. cambsukguy

          Re: I guess

          If it was at least slightly funny, I would consider a smirk. If it was meant as a crappy joke as opposed to a snarky comment then I would expect the Joke Alert icon to remind us, jk,jk.

          But it was yet another dig at a company no worse for sure than other giant mega corporations.

          Maybe MS does have a less good search product, I wouldn't know, I use Bing because it produces results with fewer ads (and isn't Google) whilst giving me results that appear similar or better in some respects (the sidebars for instance). If you prefer the other one fine.

          But, having a smaller market does not make you a less good product, often the reverse. Examples might be The Sun newspaper vs The Guardian (obviously you might insert Telegraph here).

          Some might say Mercedes vs Kia or any number of other makers.

          And many, many here might say Samsung vs Sony or HTC when it comes to Android phones. That is without needing to mention the low sales volume of Lumias vs the fact that the owners often love them and will not switch to Android for money.

          The point is that commentards here making pathetic digs without even the slightest humour, merit or any facts distort the reality and maintain the bullshit level.

          If that were allowed to continue without someone saying something then only Apple would sell anything since they are the best, without question, at everything, period.

          But you know better don't you? You're welcome.

          1. Captain DaFt

            Re: I guess

            Just a tip for ya:

            These days, high quality knickers that won't constantly twist-up on you can be had for very reasonable prices.

          2. Tim Roberts 1

            Re: I guess

            "If that were allowed to continue without someone saying something then only Apple would sell anything since they are the best, without question, at everything, period."

            What sort of moronic statement is that? I haven't seen an Apple search engine, DSLR, ham radio transceiver, CNC machine, welder........ hell the list of what they don't do/make/produce is bigger than the list of what they do.

            You must live in the Apple alternative reality field mate.

            1. BongoJoe

              Re: I guess

              I just had vision of iTunes having to be installed on the welder...

              But at least that is one tool which one will be holding correctly.

          3. Hans 1

            Re: I guess

            @ cambsukguy

            Oh I know, I know ...

            1 or 2 people using an online service does not sound like a joke to you ??? Naïve ? If you do not know what that means, get a thesaurus, if you do not know what a thesaurus is, get a dictionary and work yourself up.

            Besides, 316 million is the entire "estimated" population of the US and I don't expect toddlers to be using bing, for example, note that there are many more age groups that do not use the Intertubes. That is why you got my downvote.

    2. Yugguy

      Re: I guess

      Well it made me grin.

      The only time I ever "use" Bing is when on a new PC I type a url in wrong and haven't changed the default search provider.

      At which I mumble some inaudible curses and type it in correctly.

  4. SineWave242

    Dodgy Microsoft Code

    What else is new?

    And they're using Windows based servers? Good luck! I wouldn't run a Windows server for public toilets network, let alone a search engine like Yahoo or Bing. Speaking of search engines ask Google what OS they're running for servers... and have they experienced any downtimes? Running Linux servers gives you usually about 99.9% of uptime annually, if not more.

    1. N2

      Re: Dodgy Microsoft Code

      Agreed,

      But Microsoft probably pay people to report otherwise.

      1. bpfh
        Happy

        Re: Dodgy Microsoft Code

        I have had Win2K Advanced servers running IIS & SQL Server with IIRC a 524 days uptime record We only shut them down to move datacentres, then another 10 months later we renewed the hardware and expanded. I left the company, but we never had too many problems just as long as the AV was updated and a Linux firewall filtered everything except port 80, it worked great.

        1. Joe Montana

          Re: Dodgy Microsoft Code

          524 days uptime is nothing, 4 figures is not uncommon for non windows boxes (unix, vms, netware, routers etc) and its quite telling that you used a linux box to protect the windows box from attack... your linux box probably had the same or higher uptime than the windows box behind it.

  5. frank ly

    A code update:

    Had it been tested 'properly'. Was it deployed onto all servers at once? Sometimes, I sit and wonder at the things that happen out there.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A code update:

      " Was it deployed onto all servers at once"

      Just how many servers would they need to satisfy the 'demand' for Bing ? Would have thought one plus a backup for when they needed to reboot for WIndows updates would be plenty

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        Re: A code update:

        One user or one trillion, the servers needed to index the internet, categorize it and them optimize it such that the most likely/popular searches are cached are many. Bing itself is probably tens of thousands of servers on the back end. Even if you only need a few hundred for the front end.

        This is why there aren't eleventy squillion search engines out there. The barrier to entry is huge.

        1. cambsukguy

          Re: A code update:

          We are lucky there aren't; isn't a significant proportion of web traffic search indexing?

          Ten more search engines and the interwebs would be nothing but crawlers, they would have to do it at night in the less-used timezone peaks like the pacific or something.

          Or share their results on some basis.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: A code update:

          Don't forget index all local files on OS installs too, mind you that workload might be assisted and sponsored by others.

          This applies to more than Bing btw.

          (Please note it is your duty as a citizen of the new earth to have all your keystrokes passed through the engines of knowledge, as long as you think correctly you have nothing to fear)

  6. channel extended
    Happy

    Friday after New Years.

    More likely the bosses were all off on a four day weekend, since New Years day was thursday. While they were gone the cleaning guy did the upgrade and pushed the big red button that said "ARE YOU SURE". When the SO got back from lunch, he paniced and began rebooting all of the IIS machines. This led to the systems thrashing up and down. This continued until a grey beard notice the his email wasn't working a put a Knoppix disk in and undid the upgrade.

    He did this with one hand. The other hand held his coffee.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Where's the redundancy?

    Isn't the "cloud" a cloud of computers on the internet, presumably with some redundancy and geographic dispersion?

    Why does the release of some bad code cause everything to fail?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Where's the redundancy?

      They've already had enough redundancy in recent months...

    2. cambsukguy

      Re: Where's the redundancy?

      Everything didn't fail, a bit did. A cluster-fuckup in a particular section.

      "This morning, some of our customers experienced a brief, isolated services interruption which has now been resolved," a Microsoft spokesman said in a brief statement Friday.

      As the first comment stated, O365 was a bit flaky but said it was up etc.

      Still crappy, still wrong but not Everything.

      Personally, I never saw a single error page and every tab I open is Bing regardless of whether I search.

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

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