Yahoo and Bing faced downtime due to code update bugs

Microsoft and Yahoo search engines went offline on Friday after the former mistakenly uploaded wrong code, sources have reported. The search engines are now available again.

Sources within Yahoo have told Reuters news agency that not hackers, but a faulty software update would be the cause of the downtime. Microsoft is said to have rolled out new code for the Bing search engine, but it subsequently caused the website to no longer function. Because Microsoft provides the Yahoo search engine with search results, it also suffered from downtime.

Because a rollback performed by Microsoft did not work, both Bing and Yahoo were unavailable for some time, Reuters said. Both search engines are now back online, but no official information has been released about what caused the downtime. On Friday, Yahoo and Bing went offline, while Microsoft’s Live.com, MSN and Outlook.com were also briefly unavailable.