bing-logoAll 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: