Microsoft"s search engine, Bing, is having a rough day as the engine was hit with an outage from roughly 2:15PM to 2:45PM ET. If you were to head on over to Bing.com, during that time, you would have been greeted with the page above.
Even though Microsoft"s Bing engine is much smaller than Google"s, according to Alexa, it is the 24th most visited site on the web which means that millions of users are likely to see this page instead of the daily images that the service shows.
The issue was wide-spread as it impacted Bing, MSN, Hotmail and Outlook.com; during the outage OneDrive was still accessible.
As expected, while Bing was offline, Siri and Cortana were impacted as well. When trying to use the assistants to search the web, no results were returned for general terms.
While the outage only lasted around thirty minutes, for anyone who was unable to access their email, this has likely caused a few headaches. Still, Microsoft appears to remedied the issue rather quickly and hopefully the service will remain stable for the remainder of the day.
For the most part, these services have been stable, although Azure has had its fair share of issues during the past few months.