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Bing.com Demonstrates How to Blow $100 Million

posted on December 3, 2009


Step 1: Spend ~$100 million on an advertising campaign.

Step 2: Let your site go down:

Screen shot 2009-12-03 at 9.53.42 PMReally? Not anything? Sad.

UPDATE: Around 30 minutes later, the big shark is back:

Screen shot 2009-12-03 at 10.14.33 PM

Now we wait to see if Bing provides an explanation or pulls a “Tiger Woods” on us. ;-)

UPDATE 2: Bing explains the outage. Read it, and see if you can tell what’s missing from its statement:

Bing.com was down between about 6:30 and 7:00 PM Pacific Time on Dec 3, 2009. During this time, users were either unable to get to the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results page.

The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.

As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.

We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing. We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Satya Nadella
Senior Vice President, Online Services Division

What’s missing? “We’re sorry.”

I’ve met Nadella a few times this is probably just an oversight, but you’d think we’d get an apology for Bing not living up to its promise.


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  • http://seoaware.com SEO Aware

    It it mean to be laughing?? :-)
    .-= SEO Aware´s last blog ..Google’s Matt Cutts Discusses Possible Big Changes in the Upcoming Years =-.

  • Travis

    a real shocker, an MS product crashes. Glad there’s no precedent for that. MS.. stop spending millions on marketing and DEVELOP GOOD SOFTWARE, you freakin’ software company! In the mean time I’ll keep getting people to switch to the Mac, it gets easier every day.

    • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

      Haha! At least it wasn’t just a blue screen. ;-)

  • http://www.newhomessection.com Jayson

    Nice! I didn’t know that Bing went down. It’s kind of embarrassing. I’m with you, the first thing I’d expect to see in the explanation is an apology for the inconvenience. Is that weird to expect an apology for using their free tool?

  • sean

    what a stupid post!

    Bing is on way to replace google, you are still talking. You should learn when to shut up.

    • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

      I can’t decide what to ban you for. Violating our comment guidelines or believing that Bing “is on way to replace google” :-P

      • Dean

        We agree with Sean! Bing is definitely going to replace Google!

        Regards,
        Horse & Buggies, Newspapers, Abacus

  • http://peterliuphoto.com Peter LIu

    I’ve used Bing maybe… once? It just never occurs to me to “Bing” something.
    .-= Peter LIu´s last blog ..Thanksgiving Sunset =-.

  • Pingback: Bing.com Demonstrates How to Blow $100 Million | Marketing

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    Hey Great job on your website, I like the layout and the colors! Also the information that this site provides is awesome.

  • Mike K

    Want to know why I’ll NEVER use Bing.com…!!? Their commercial annoys the sht out of me. Every single time I run into their commercial, I HAVE to change it. It’s THAT annoying to me…!! I’m glad that they’re spending a ton of money to dilute their shareholder’s stock. In my opinion, MSFT shareholder’s should sue their board members…!

  • http://dhptoronto.com Debbie Horovitch

    I think regardless of how much they spend on advertising, it will be hard to knock down the worldwide awareness of Google; remember when there used to be many search engines? – Google beat or bought them all.

    Plus Google has a simple, clean site that you CANNOT screw up your searches and produces highly relevant results every time. Why would people ever go anywhere else?

    If it’s true that Google only indexes 20% of the searchable web (I believe it – there are SO many web pages!), then there might be value for a user to perform 2 searches, one on Google and one on another like Bing – IF Bing indexes mostly different sites than Google and adds to user’s overall search volume potential.

    I tried Bing once but the UX wasn’t as simple and didn’t return what I wanted, compared to Google. Google is clean, and gives me exactly what I’m looking for every time, plus a long list of results to keep me busy & satisfied with results.
    .-= Debbie Horovitch´s last blog ..Comment on 3 Key Tools to Draw Audiences to Your Blog by Tweets that mention 3 Key Tools to Draw Audiences to Your Blog – — Topsy.com =-.

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