A recent update on the search Bing caused it to crash and user was unable to access it for an extended number of hours. According to reports posted over the internet, the outage was caused by internal problems rather than what people originally speculated as another cyber-attack.
According to a person interviewed by Reuters, the outage was brought by a bad code after they tried to update the search engine, unfortunately they were unable to roll back its previous settings and caused a domino effect that it the end crashed the system. The unnamed personnel also wants to clear rumors claiming that the outage was brought about by an external hack.
The Microsoft owned Bing search engine is being used by the Yahoo search service. The two companies agreed on deal in 2009 that enables Yahoo to use Bing in the next 10 years. Yahoo has not yet issued an official statement regarding the outage. Microsoft on the other hand admitted that a temporary outage occurred but refused to elaborate on the matter. During the outage, several social network posts complained that mobile assistant Siri and Cortana were also affected. Aside from the Yahoo homepage, several Microsoft owned domains were also reported to take quite some time to respond, this issue includes Hotmail, outlook.com, live.com and portal.office.com.
Users who try to access the Yahoo homepage on Friday we're greeted by an error message saying that Yahoo is having problems and that engineers are working on resolving the technical issue the website is currently undergoing. However, the outage did not last long and the issue was resolve. The Yahoo website was restored later that day. After the crash, reports say that Yahoo has to deal with massive backlog of search requests done during the outage.
A Microsoft spokesman stated in a short statement that "This morning, some of our customers experienced a brief, isolated services interruption which has now been resolved."