Bing Travel Outage and the Search Impact

Bing Travel Outage and the Search Impact
by Andrew Grinaker, VP of Business Development/Strategy

Over the past weekend, Bing Travel was offline for 36 hours due to a small fire at their hosting location in Seattle, Washington. Bing.com wasn't affected, as it was hosted in Microsoft's redundant systems.

According to TechFlash.com, the technology from Bing Travel was acquired by Microsoft as part of its purchase of Seattle online travel startup Farecast. In the article, Microsoft also stated they are "hard at work moving Bing Travel to the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform." They expect it to be done by early fall.

The interesting aspect of that has somewhat affected the site after the hosting outage is the search impact. While doing a search for "bing travel" at 9:00am PDT on Tuesday, July 7, the Google search query produced this interesting result.



Also, to note, the last time Google indexed (the last time Google's spiders accessed the site for information) the Bing Travel site was July 4th, almost 4 full days ago, which is uncommon for the popularity of the site. I suspect the site to be indexed within the next 24 hours but it is an interesting aspect to follow.

This just shows you how much impact an outage can have to your site, even after the outage has been fixed. A common visitor searching for Bing Travel on Google (which I understand is a rare case) may not even click on the link if it states a "Temporarily Unavailable" status.