Additionally, users also reported that other Microsoft services, such as Hotmail, outlook, and portal.office.com were redirected during the outage. Yahoo Search users were redirected to an error message on the Yahoo.com page.
According to Microsoft, the outage was caused by “bad code” during an update for the Bing search engine carried out by Microsoft. Once the error was fixed, Yahoo had trouble handling the backlog of search requests.
“Microsoft customers have experienced a brief isolated services interruption,” said a Microsoft statement.
After rolling back the update failed to fix the problem outlined on iknowseo.ca/, Microsoft was forced to shut down its servers to recover from the outage. The restart caused difficulties in Yahoo processing search requests even after the problem was identified and corrected. Yahoo search became fully functional later on Friday evening.
The problem was not caused by a cyber-attack as was originally feared. Speculation on Twitter had originally floated the question of whether North Korea was behind the problem after the sanctions imposed on it because of its supposed involvement with the Sony Pictures attack in November.
Cyber security has been at the forefront of the news since the Sony attack and many other high profile firms have been the target of hackers. Prior to Sony, Russian hackers attacked financial firms such as JPMorgan and even accessed the White House computer network.
Internal problems with the Bing engine aren’t good news for Yahoo. Yahoo recently signed an agreement with Mozilla replacing the Google search with Yahoo search in the Firefox browser. A move that left many casual users unhappy with both companies, but tripled the number of Yahoo users in December.
“Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004. Our agreement came up for renewal this year, and we took this as an opportunity to review our competitive strategy and explore our options,” said Chris Beard, CEO of Mozilla, in an interview in November.
Yahoo Search has been powered by Microsoft’s Bing since 2009.
