Yahoo Search Back Online After 4+ Hour Outage; Bing Went Down Earlier Friday

Our headline has been changed to reflect that Yahoo’s search site began working again between 6-7 pm ET. For more information, see the updates at the end of the original article.

Yahoo’s dedicated search site at search.yahoo.com remains offline at the moment, a couple hours after Bing suffered and recovered from a similar outage.

As I type this, Yahoo’s search service is loading intermittently — but even if the service does load, it can’t execute a search request. In other cases, visitors are getting the “Yahoo will be right back…” message seen above.

Yahoo gets its search results from Bing, which was also down at the same time earlier today, but has since come back online. According to some of the tweets from those who noticed, both Bing and Yahoo were down simultaneously starting around 2:30 pm ET.

Well, this isn't good… @Bing is down. pic.twitter.com/aHxFzkiP2V

— Aaron Hall (@GoodThings2Life) January 2, 2015

Bing is down https://t.co/6SJVg2g5FG pic.twitter.com/lh2zWjdedv

— Jeff Kart (@jeffkart) January 2, 2015

Has anyone noticed that the Bing and Yahoo search engines are DOWN? pic.twitter.com/ldjSlHPKqI

— Lisa Raehsler (@lisarocksSEM) January 2, 2015

Looks like Bing is down pic.twitter.com/p7jQwdzEpx

— Laura Mandaro (@lauramandaro) January 2, 2015

Bing is Down pic.twitter.com/gzgKAOoVVS

— Chairiel (@_Chairiel) January 2, 2015

Tom Warren of The Verge also noticed that Siri and Microsoft’s Outlook search functions were down. Based on my own testing, Siri is back now and completing web searches like normal.

Microsoft shared a generic statement with TechCrunch:

“This morning Microsoft experienced a brief, isolated services outage which has now been resolved. Our apologies for any inconvenience.”

We’ve asked for additional details about the Bing outage, but that statement is likely what Microsoft will tell us, too. Yahoo’s PR team hasn’t replied to our requests for information.

Postscript: Five minutes after publishing, Yahoo gave us this statement:

“We are aware that Yahoo search is unavailable to users. Our engineers are working to restore the service at the earliest.”

Postscript, 2:50 pm PT: As expected, Microsoft has shared essentially the same statement with us as above:

This morning, some of our customers experienced a brief, isolated services interruption which has now been resolved.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s search page/service is still not functioning.

Postscript, 4:00 pm PT: Yahoo’s dedicated search site is now back online and functioning normally, after an outage that lasted more than four hours.