Bing and Yahoo went down but hackers weren't to blame
Notice that Bing and Yahoo searches were down earlier today? Or maybe Siri and Cortana? No, it wasn't the result of a hack -- it was something less nefarious according to Reuters' sources. Apparently Microsoft issued a bad code update and then couldn't hit CRTL+Z fast enough once it went live. This caused a bit of a domino effect, it'd seem: Because Redmond's roll-back didn't work, it had to turn off groups of linked servers to get back to the point where things were working as they did pre-crash. Since Bing powers Yahoo searches, that caused things on Yahoo's end to go on the fritz because of the backlog of search requests that populated when the problem was resolved, Reuters notes.
TechCrunch reports that the outage took Live.com -- the Hotmail redirect -- down briefly, as well. Each respective outfit confirmed the outages and, as of now, both are back up and running. Phew, Friday night's saved for the non-Google users out there.
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