Comments on: Seattle fire knocks out service to Bing Travel, other sites

At least two dozen sites experience protracted outage following Thursday night electrical fire at Fisher Plaza data center. Verizon's Seattle-area DSL service also gets temporarily disrupted.

[gerrrg]

...and there goes that 1percentage point increase that Bing gained over Live Search...

[JCPayne]

Hehe... Those that use that service probably thought Bing had finally Bung.....

[nwberean]

Having worked at a server farm in another Seattle data complex I wonder why they are using sprinklers for fire supression. The server farm I was at used a Halon system, which also I believe, would work around generators and other electrical equipment. 19th century sprinkler systems do not work well with 21st century electronic equipment.

[kieranmullen]

I agree. Apparently Halon is bad for you, but it is not like people should be camping out when there is a fire alarm going? Other systems are using C02.



KieranMullen
[CNET editor's note: Prohibited spam deleted.]

[ncalishome]

I'm sure they use a Halon system in the data center, but in a (likely closer to 19th century) "garage-level electrical room" it would not be as important or expected, at lease in my opinion.

[racervortex]

Halon has been outlawed for new installations for many years. Facilities choosing to deploy gas based fire supression typically use FM-200. While fire supression is required by code, it can also be looked at as insurance. Gas systems are very expensive, particularly in large scale data centers. So how much insurance do you want to buy? There's also the problem with life forms not being compatable with gas discharge :)

[slecalvez]

How stupid can the Bing team be, not to have a Disaster Recovery site in another building. I am amazed by their stupidity....

[dennisl59]

Agreed. They all should be fired for neglience. And these are the "smartest people in the world"....But NO Common Sense. Probably sub-contracted to a H1-B outfit too.

[timber2005]

It was just one section of the entire Bing. Yes, they should have had redundancy for that one section, but it appears that might be due to the "partners" where they get their data from.

[edentifier2]

I guess Google should be sacked too... they have more downtime than anybody...

[ncalishome]

Authorize.net is the bigger story here. I personally don't care if the Bing travel section goes down, but having a service that processes payments go down for thousands of websites that depend on it is truly stupid. I've recommended and implemented authorize.net to my customers but will be taking a look at redundancy in the future and might be pitching an alternative going forward. Authorize.net had to provide twitter updates on their progress restoring service FFS.

[rmva]

Isn't Bing still in beta?

[pentest]

The software is, the networking should be rock solid.

[xenophod]

Badda-Bing Badda-Bang Badda-Boom

What we had here was a failure to plan ahead. No excuse for a large company like Microsoft. Not saying it can't happen to any company, but most have plans for such catastrophes.

[topgunb2]

yeah like google docs, gmail, maps etc etc, the list goes on, not to mention apple activation issues

[sebastien.kalonji]

Absolutely unacceptable for a company like MS. Cheapos!

[edentifier2]

Not quite as cheap as using Google Apps for mission critical apps....

Google downtime, anyone...?

[repalviglator]

I'm collecting a list of the sites affected by this Fisher Plaza data center fire here:
http://blog.kylemulka.com/2009/07/list-of-sites-affected-by-fisher-plaza-data-center-fire/

[iff2mastamatt]

Google started the fire!

[gregoryba]

man i feel for everyone that has to deal with this outage right now. regardless of which side of these services you're on - vendor, customer, or the like - you're in a ****** situation. when this is all over get yourself a beer/ice cream cone/xanex.

[golfercacher]

I heard that this fire is also impacting Groundspeak (geocaching.com). Hopefully those guys can get up and running soon.

[xenophod]

They appear up and running now, I got an email from them on Jul 3, 2009 at 12:32 AM no mention of being down. They did something right.

[amweiss]

I must say I'm surprised that the main part of this report is about Bing and some other sites, when thousands of small merchants lost untold dollars due to Authorize.net being affected by this fire. Please focus on what is affecting companies who rely on the net to make money, rather than Bing and some other sites that can easily handle the storm.

[gwailo247]

Why are you surprised? Its a symbiotic relationship. The Microsoft haters get another fix of schadenfreude, the article gets traffic.

[hankthedwarf]

Wasn't the original point of the internet to be de-centralized? You'd think Microsoft would be keen to that.

[tm_anon]

Microsoft does things their own way, just like a 3 year old.

[Vegaman_Dan]

The news is still not updated. I'm watching the 11 PM Friday News for KOMO TV / 4 in Seattle now and they are still without power in the building. They brought in generators, but those sprinkler systems pretty much ruined the electrical items in the building and when you're talking about a multi-million dollar high end television studio, you can imagine the impact this may have.

They are broadcasting using satellite TV trucks for a control room and mobile cameras set up with the news anchors on a patio deck with a couple of small clamp on lights barely making them visible. What's even kind of neat is that they have no on screen graphics capability- no control room. That means no blue screen and the weather forecaster is forced to use a paper flip chart panel on an easel to draw out the information, maps, temps. His penmanship needs work. :)

But Fisher Plaza has a lot of businesses in it- several television studios and a half dozen radio stations, all of whom are either off the air or trying to make something up with mobile equipment at the transmitter tower. It's very much a 'best effort' situation. It's rather neat.

Web sites like Bing only had their travel portion affected. And that's being rerouted now to another system so that won't be an issue for long. The credit card authentication site is much more of an issue.

FYI: The electrical vault fire was where the power to the building joined with Seattle City Light and burned at temps of over 5000F, according to the fire fighter interviewed. That's some impressive temps!

For all of you ripping on Microsoft- get a life. Stuff happens and they are working around it. I don't expect if you had a fire at your place of work that things would be perfect either.

[SleepyQ]

It looks like Bing Travel did not migrate over to a MS data center yet after the acquisition of Farecast.

[aawindoze2]

Wow, thats scary dude. Always have a mirror site!

RT
[CNET editor's note: Prohibited spam deleted.]

[SooperGenius007]

This is odd indeed!!!

Seattlites know that across the street from Fisher Plaza is the Space Needle, and Seattlites remember last year's super awesome (sarcasm) New Year's fireworks didn't work because of a computer glitch. Apparently it ran Windows!

Now the computers are catching on fire and again, microsoft is involved! Just reboot the servers, post-haste! Like they did in 2008 and keep your fingers crossed that there will be fireworks!


http://www.seattlepi.com/local/345650_fireworks02.html

[Vegaman_Dan]

Fisher Plaza and the Space Needle are several blocks apart and not related to each other in any way.

No computers caught fire in this electrical vault fire and no servers were ever in danger. And those servers mostly run Linux, BTW.

The only thing odd is the lack of accuracy in your report. :)

[shycelticwitch]

Quit bashing MS. For once the issue is not their fault. It is affecting a lot of companies, thank goodness mine is not one of them. I hope they find a quick solution to get these businesses back up and running. I am not a big fan of MS, but so far I like the Bing interface. If they keep on innovating like this they might make a believer out of me, but for now I will stick with what's worked the best for me so far. Not so happy about Authorize.net getting caught with their pants down. I don't use the service but have friends with businesses who do.

[cathybar]

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