Bing Travel down 36 hours
By Ria Basu

Microsoft has cash reserves of more than $20 billion.  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that they would spend at least $100 million this year on advertising their new search engine Bing and hinted at spending as much as $10 billion to consolidate Bing.

Apart from being a good search engine, Bing also aims to be a one stop site for Travel and other services.  Bing.com/travel helps you ‘make informed decisions about travel’. Bing Travel lets you compare travel agents, airlines and hotels.  Bing Travel also claims that it has enough intelligence built in to let you know if it’s the right time to buy travel tickets.

Microsoft lost Bing Travel last Friday due to a fire in a shared data centre.  Despite having the best technologies and $20 billion in the bank, there was no proper disaster recovery plan for this particular service.  While many other websites in this shared data centre were up and running in 12 hours, it took Microsoft 36 hours to get Bing Travel online again.

Certainly not acceptable for a company like Microsoft. Microsoft tried to give it a public relations spin while speaking to tech blog Techflash

“
Bing Travel is a complex system of servers, databases and networking hardware that runs at massive scale," explained Microsoft spokeswoman Whitney Burk via email. "It takes a bit of time after an interruption of power such as this one to bring it back online. Given power was restored at 2am today, we feel we had the service back up as quickly as was possible."

As part of the continued integration of Farecast (the company) into Microsoft, we have been (prior to this weekend’s incident) hard at work moving Bing Travel to the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform," Burk said. "But again, given the complexity of this service and our desire to do this in a way that is invisible to customers, this process takes time and must be done carefully. We expect to have the move completed by early Fall.
“

(Techgoss had reported the following story on July 4, 2009)

Bing Travel lost in fire
By Ria Basu

Microsoft has cash reserves of more than $20 billion.  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that they would spend at least $100 million on advertising their new search engine Bing and hinted at spending as much as $10 billion to consolidate Bing.

Apart from being a good search engine, Bing also aims to be a one stop site for Travel and other services.  Bing.com/travel helps you ‘make informed decisions about travel’. Bing Travel lets you compare travel agents, airlines and hotels.  Bing Travel also claims that it has enough intelligence built in to let you know if it’s the right time to buy travel tickets.

But it seems that all of Microsoft’s technology and money cannot help one of its services due to lack of a Disaster Recovery plan. Or the plan not working at all.

Yesterday (July 3), there was a fire at the Seattle Data Centre which houses a number of high profile websites like Bing Travel and Authorize.net. While smaller companies with backup sites in different buildings switched to secondary computers and were soon online, the mighty Microsoft has not been able to get Bing Travel up and running.

At the time of writing this article (14 hours since the fire), Bing Travel is still down. When you logon to Bing Travel it says:

“
Sorry, Bing Travel is currently unavailable
A fire occurred at Fisher Plaza in downtown Seattle just after midnight on Friday morning, July 3. A blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers. This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there has been no impact to any other aspects of Bing. We're hard at work to restore service following this unexpected event and appreciate your patience.
“

Bing and its associated services like Travel were only launched in 2009. This would mean that they are using the latest hardware, software and collective knowledge about past disasters. It would certainly be embarrassing for some managers to try to explain why they have $20 billion in the bank but a disaster recovery plan (or not) that did not work well.