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Bing Travel at last restored
5 Jul2009
All those who wanted to use Bing Travel can now do so, as Microsoft has finally brought Bing Travel back online. This event which occurred a little late in my opinion took place on 11:00 AM Saturday. After 36 hours, the site finally came back online. As we reported previously, these undesirable incidents took place due to the fire and power outage at Seattle’s Fisher Plaza East data center facilities.
As I discussed in a previous post, that it is quite strange that while other sites were back online, Bing Travel still took time to return back. The reason behind this delay, according to Microsoft’s spokesperson, Whitney Burk was:
Bing Travel is a complex system of servers, databases and networking hardware that runs at massive scale.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 2 am today, we feel we had the service back up as quickly as was possible.
Ok point well taken. But the question arises Why was Bing Travel servers not shifted to their own data centers. This was a possible move since the outage did not affect the main Bing search engine. Was it because, that Microsoft lacked a backup plan. Burk in relation to this said:
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.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
It becomes more surprising when you consider the fact that other companies such as Seattle’s Redfin had a backup plan intact which helped them minimize the damages. Let us hope that Microsoft does something in that regard.
You may want to read a couple of other posts related to this fire incident. These include:
- In: Development
- Tags: Bing, Bing Travel, Fisher Plaza, Microsoft, Redfin
3 Responses to Bing Travel at last restored
Dennis Schaal
July 5th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Apparently Bing Travel didn’t have a redundant system in a different facility, right? And, Redfin, after going through a similar drama at Fisher Plaza a year earlier, did. Bing Travel apparently took the longest of the affected websites to come back online, perhaps because of the complexity of its system, but those other websites were down for a protacted period, too. Shouldn’t it just be standard for websites to have redundant systems in separate facilities? Or is that just too costly? It would seem to be a no-brainer.
Muhammad Ali
July 6th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Quite an interesting perspective you presented Dennis. In my opinion websites shud have redundant systems as part of their Disaster Recovery Plan
Outage Hit Bing Travel as Integration Slated for Fall Completion | Travel News Tips - Top Destinations
July 6th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
[...] The Geekword blog reportedly has some information from Microsoft on why Bing Travel (the website formerly known as Farecast) was down and unavailable for 36 hours after a fire late Thursday night (Pacific Time) took out the power to Fisher Plaza, which housed Bing Travel’s servers. [...]