Fire Stops Bing, Service Restored Within Hours

Apparently, the Bing Travel service was disrupted earlier today, but Microsoft quickly brought it back to life. This is a good sign that Microsoft seems to be on top of things at the moment, however, some might suggest that backups (although they may be expensive) are essential for such services, and that Microsoft needs to consider that as an option.

Overheating switches in the Seattle Fisher Plaza data center has caused a fire which triggered major disruptions to Bing Travel, Authorize.net, and other companies who had hosted their data at the plaza. It took nearly 30 hours for most of the websites affected to be restored.

Earlier today, Jim Clayton, vice president and general manager of Fisher Communications’ Seattle broadcast properties, said “We had a power surge last night, and the power surge overheated some of our switch gear, and the switch gear began to smoke, and when it smokes, the fire suppression protocol takes over, and then it dumps water, so that really took the building offline, and because there was so much water there, even though our generator system did, in fact, work, it can’t be put online just because of safety issues until we’re certain that all of the water is out of the switch gear.”

Bing Travel is built largely on technology acquired when Microsoft acquired Farecast, a Seattle company, and it stands to reason the information Farecast’s servers at Fisher Plaza has not been relocated to Microsoft’s own hosting network.

Bing Travel is back up and running at 11:45 AM.