jatiN mahindrA doT coM

It kind of makes you wonder how important Bing Webmaster Tools is to Microsoft when it takes them over three days to fix a bug that completely makes the tools unusable.

Monday morning, we reported that Bing Webmaster Tools had an unexpected error which disallowed webmasters from accessing any of their verified domains. Many threads and complaints in the Bing forums, amongst others, were created.

It took two days for the Bing forum representative to acknowledge the bug in the forums. Brett Yount posted a thread at the Bing Community over two days after the first report of the bug. He said:

As you are probably aware, the tools are currently down. We are working to correct this ASAP.

Then finally, yesterday at around 10am, three days after the first report of the bug, Microsoft fixed the issue. Here is what Brett said:

I just verified that the tools are running again. Though I can’t get into specifics, it looks like the problem was caused by an update to the search index. Needless to say, we are working to make sure more issues such as this do not happen in the near future.

Got that, an update to the search index caused this bug. So there was a search index update that seemed to go unnoticed for the most part. Well, there are some minor threads discussing some issues with the new index, but for the most part, it went unnoticed. That update, caused Webmaster Tools to fail and it took over three days for Microsoft to fix it.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

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