Microsoft's Bing Travel site came back online at 11 a.m. Saturday, after one-and-a-half days of downtime following the fire and power outage at Seattle's Fisher Plaza East data center facilities. That was longer than other sites affected by the fire. Why the delay?
"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."
We also asked why the company hadn't already shifted the servers to its own data centers. The outage didn't affect the main Bing search engine. Bing Travel is based on technology acquired by Microsoft as part of its purchase of Seattle online travel startup Farecast more than a year ago.
"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."
It's not clear why Microsoft didn't have back-up plan in place to prevent such an extended site outage in the event of an incident. The company hasn't yet answered our questions on that topic. Preparation by other companies, such as Seattle's Redfin, helped them minimize the impact of the fire on their operations.
Another site that was down for more than 24 hours was Seattle's Allrecipes.com. Esmee Williams of Allrecipes confirmed that the incident shut down Allrecipes.com, mobile.allrecipes.com, Allrecipes.co.ik, Allrecipes.fr, de.allrecipes.com, allrecipes.au, Allrecipes.jp and Allrecipes.cn -- in addition to the company's intranet and email system. It did not affect the Allrecipes "Dinner Spinner" iPhone app.
Representatives of Fisher Communications said yesterday that an electrical fire late Thursday night triggered a fire-supression system, dumping water and resuling in the shutdown of power at Fisher Plaza East, which contains data and network operations and co-location facilities for a number of companies. Giant portable generators have been brought in to run the equipment for now.
The web sites and network operations of many companies were hit by the shutdown.
We'll continue to report on this story. Contact us at techflashtips@bizjournals.com.
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