Search engines temporarily went dark after
Microsoft pushed out a bad code update and then struggled to roll it back, a
person familiar with the matter said
San Francisco: Yahoo Inc and Microsoft Corp
search engines temporarily went dark on Friday after Microsoft pushed out a bad
code update and then struggled to roll it back, a person briefed on the outages
told Reuters.
The outages were not caused by an outside attack,
the person said, declining to be named because the discussion concerned
internal Yahoo matters. Microsoft’s Bing search engine powers Yahoo search
under a 10-year deal announced in 2009.
Yahoo was not immediately available for
comment. Microsoft confirmed the outage, but declined to comment on the cause.
On Friday afternoon, users who typed search.yahoo.com got an error message
saying that Yahoo engineers were working to resolve the issue.
The search engine appeared to be working again
later in the day. After the crash, Microsoft’s roll-back procedure failed,
forcing it to shut down its groups of linked servers to get back the point
where everything worked smoothly, the person said.
Once the problem was resolved, Yahoo had
trouble handling the backlog of search requests, the person added. “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.
