Microsoft Bing's travel site was knocked out at the beginning of the holiday weekend by an electrical fire at a Seattle-area data center. No other portions of Bing were affected. In June, the search engine made incremental gains in the market against ultra-competitors Yahoo and Google, as Microsoft continued to support it with a massive ad campaign.Microsoft Bing is fully running again after a July 2 fire at a
Seattle data center that took down
the Travel portion of the search engine.
The electrical fire, whose cause
is under investigation but has not yet been determined, started "in a
garage-level electrical room," according to facility owner Fisher
Communications, and "disrupted power to Fisher Plaza East and knocked out the
facilitys backup generation system."
In addition to knocking out the
servers that ran Microsoft Bings Travel site, the fire also took down
other Websites including Authorize.net, an e-commerce site that
provides merchants with
credit card services.
Authorize.net released a
statement on July 6 detailing the lessons learned from the incident.
"We are examining all aspects of
this outage and implementing steps to mitigate future risks," the
company said. "Over the next weeks, we will be completing the work to
ensure that we have two
fully functional, synchronized hot sites. Failing over from one to the
other
will occur in a matter of seconds."
In addition to operating the
Fisher
Plaza data center facility, Fisher
Communications owns and operates 20 television stations and eight radio stations
in the western United States.
Following the disruption,
Microsoft posted a message stating it was "isolated to Bing Travel only, and
there has been no impact to any other aspects of Bing." Until service was
restored, the company suggested, users could venture over to Microsoft partner
Orbitz to fulfill their travel needs.
Microsoft had been in the midst of porting Bing to the cloud.
"As
part of the continued integration of Farecast (the company) into Microsoft, we
have been (prior to this weekends incident) hard at work moving Bing Travel to
the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform," a Microsoft spokesperson told eWEEK. "But again, given the complexity of this
service and our desire to do this in a way that is invisible to customers, this
process takes time and must be done carefully. We expect to have the move
completed by early fall."
Service was restored by the
morning of July 4.
A
July 1 report by StatCounter found that Bing had gained 8.23 percent of the U.S.
Web search market in June, powered by a massive advertising campaign and
considerable news coverage. In the weeks previous to Bings June 3 launch,
Microsofts share of the search engine market had hovered at 7.86 percent.
StatCounter bases its numbers of
4 billion page loads per month, as monitored through a network of Websites. Its
same report found that Google dipped from 78.72 percent to 78.48 percent in June, positioning it comfortably
ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft.
If Bings numbers hold, they
could represent a turning of fortune for Microsoft in the search-engine arena. A
June 16 report by research firm Nielsen had found that Microsofts share of that
market had dropped 14.6 percent year-over-year by May 2009, suggesting that the
company was losing ground against Google and Yahoo even as it continued to fund
what was then known as Microsoft Live Search.
Editor's Note: This article has been updated with a comment from Microsoft.
/ 4 
