Microsoft's Bing service was down on Thursday, offering us an excellent opportunity to write a fun title at Big Redmond's expense, an opportunity we hastened to accept. The Huffington Post noticed the downage, which gave Bing users, such as they are, error messages when trying to bring up the site for almost an hour.
Those error messages eventually morphed into CAPCHA requests, though the site was still not functional (check out the above link for screen shots of the outage).
The downtime comes as Microsoft is working to grow Bing's market share of the search business and earn credibility with users, and that does seem to sum up the story nicely.
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Bada Bing, Bada Boom!
Heh, this article is going to get some fun comments, I think.
“Get the machine that goes bing!”
Not like Apple, iTunes, Google, Amazon, eBay, etc. never had any downtime…
When Bing has a major crash over something incredibly stupid (i.e. no working backups), THEN I’ll laugh.
link in the article?
“link in the article?”
Google it
Oops! Link to the Huffington Post has been added! Thanks for the note.
And you, Harry, are a funny lad.
Our guest Karma does have point about other services going down and not being the butt of jokes. I guess it just that Bing is new and may still be having growing pains, hence the attention.
I use Bing from time to time. It’s OK - just different. Not quite sure it should be the butt of jokes, but different strokes, I guess…
I too have used it, but I have to remember to Bing. Google is too easy for us to get to; It is in the upper right corner of the Safari window and we can usually get to it by selecting text and right/control clicking.
I use FireFox with the BetterSearch plugin. It is also in the upper right, but it allows me a dropdown with - in my case - 11 different search engines, including Google and Bing.
Bing gets the jokes because the name is silly. Google got them early on.
Really, who makes these things up????
I guess I missed that downtime since I don’t use Bing anymore. I tried it for a few days, but Google seems to fill 99% of my needs so unless Bing can top Google in searches, I’ll only try it every so often. Bing is OK, but just not good enough to make any large amount of search engine users to switch from Google.
How’d anybody notice?!?
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