Microsoft sites, including search engine Bing and MSN.com downed by ‘bad code,’ not cyberattack
On Friday almost all Microsoft powered websites like Bing, MSN.com, Outlook, Live were knocked out of service with most users returning page not available messages. Even the Microsoft powered Yahoo! search was knocked down for about 20 minutes before being restored.
This caused users to speculate that Microsoft was under some kind of high profile hack attack. Â Given the rising temperatures between United States and North Korea after the Sony Pictures hack attack, many Twitter users blamed North Korean hackers for the outage.
In reality all the Microsoft sites, including search engine Bing and MSN.com, were knocked briefly offline Friday after bad code was rolled out, according to a report.
The source said the Microsoft engineers struggled to immediately roll-back the code, which would have potentially cut the outage time down considerably. After the roll-back failed, engineers were forced to shut down its groups of linked servers to get back to a safe point where the sites were fully operational. The period from the release of the bad code to the reboot to safe point caused outage in most Microsoft powered services.
Microsoft itself came out with a statement on Friday which said that its sites suffered a “brief, isolated services outage,” but did not indicate any ‘bad code’ being the reason for the flaw. Microsoft of late has been suffering from the ‘bad code’Â fever repeatedly.
The company could not be reached for comment on Saturday
