Microsoft sites and its search engine Bing.com went offline for about 20 minutes on Friday, according to several Twitter users and other web monitor services. The cause, however, is not due to a cyber-attack as many believed.
In the later part of 2014, many high-profile firms and digital services have been targeted by hackers, including the recent Sony PlayStation Network and the Microsoft Xbox Live platform.
According to Tech Crunch, Bing.com and search.yahoo.com suffered a brief outage, while others also reported that Microsoft's Hotmail service, outlook.com and portal.office.com were almost unreachable during the Bing outage.
If a person tried to search something on the Yahoo homepage, it would just redirect to search.yahoo.com and show an error message. Bing users were unable to connect to the search engine's website.
However, a source speaking to Reuters said that the outage was not due to a cyber-attack, but was due to a "bad code" when Microsoft was trying to push an update on the Bing search engine.
The Redmond company tried to roll-back the bad update but failed, leaving them to shut down some of its linked servers in order to be restored to a working state.
Even after the problem was fixed, Yahoo still had difficulties in processing the backlog of search requests during the downtime, the source told Reuters.
On the same day, a Microsoft spokesman gave a statement saying that their customers have experienced a "brief, isolated services interruption."
Techcrunch reports that the Yahoo search feature was restored on the evening of the same day.