Finally! Mobile assistants Siri and Cortana got some well-deserved time off last Friday when Yahoo Inc and Microsoft Corp search engines were brought to a standstill after Microsoft released an update with a snippet of bad code that caused servers to crash. Although Microsoft immediately tried to roll back the broken code they were unable to fix the problem. Eventually, engineers were forced to go through their server estate, shutting down hardware until they could fix the problem and eventually get everything working again.
On Friday afternoon, users who typed search.yahoo.com got an error message saying that Yahoo engineers were working to resolve the issue. It appears that Bing was restored first followed by Yahoo. Yahoo search seems to have been unavailable for about four hours.
Once the problem was corrected, Yahoo experienced some additional trouble handling the backlog of search requests. Later that day a spokesperson at Microsoft said, “This morning, some of our customers experienced a brief, isolated services interruption which has now been resolved. “
Originally, employees thought the outage might have been caused by a cyber attack , but that idea was quickly dismissed when Microsoft released it was an internal error that caused the problem. This must have come as somewhat of a relief to Microsoft and Yahoo, given recent cyber attack incidents that have impacted some of the major companies lately. Sony, anybody?
What did people have to say in the forums? Some comments were complaining in nature while others were straight out funny. And one was close up and personal. Here are some of them:
- It’s fair enough that you wouldn’t have noticed if Bing had gone down. After all, there are probably even less people using Bing than plonkers still clinging desperately onto their Google Glasses.
- Microsoft / Yahoo has a search engine? Let’s Google it and find out what they are!
- With so many things that are broken at Yahoo I didn’t even notice. It is just another normal day at that site.
- Pure amateur hour. Backout procedures should never fail. They should be thoroughly reviewed and tested before ANY new code EVER gets deployed.
- As a software developer, I can only feel empathy for the poor b@stard who pushed the bad code. He must have been mortified.
- So this outage affected all of what, the three people in the world who still use ie\bing? What’s next? Is Netscape Navigator going to crash? Oh dread!
- Ever since Nadella took over, there have been screw-ups in updates. Did he install a friend with no experience in the QA department?