Social Media and Marketing

Microsoft Bing’s travel site was knocked out at the beginning of the holiday weekend by an electrical fire at a Seattle-area data centre.

Published: 07 Jul 2009

Microsoft Bing’s travel site was knocked out at the beginning of the holiday weekend by an electrical fire at a Seattle-area data centre.

The travel section of Microsoft’s new search engine was reportedly down for around 36 hours. No other portions of Bing were affected. Service was restored by the morning of July 4.

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 weekend’s 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.”