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Welcome to Microsoft Pri0: That's Microspeak for top priority, and that's the news and observations you'll find here from Seattle Times technology reporter Sharon Chan.

July 6, 2009 at 4:59 PM

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Seattle data center fire knocked out Bing Travel at Microsoft

Posted by Sharon Pian Chan

A Thursday night fire at a Seattle data center knocked out Microsoft's travel search engine, Bing Travel, for two days over the weekend, raising questions about why the service was not backed up elsewhere. The question is particularly important as Microsoft prepares to begin selling its cloud computing product, Azure, at the Worldwide Partners Conference in New Orleans this coming weekend.

With Azure, Microsoft's would host a customer's software and data in Microsoft's data centers. Winning business means customers would have to trust Microsoft to keep their data private and secure.

Bing Travel, which came from Microsoft's acquisition Farecast, was hosted at a third-party data center, and the service was down from Thursday night through 2 a.m. Saturday.

Microsoft released this statement today:

"Bing Travel is a complex system of servers, databases and networking hardware that runs at massive scale. It takes a bit of time after an interruption of power such as this one to bring it back online. Given power was restored at 2 a.m. Saturday, we feel we had the service back up as quickly as was possible."

Apparently Microsoft had not backed up the service its own data center. The company says it expects to fully transfer the service to its own servers this fall:

"As part of the continued integration of Farecast (the company) into Microsoft, we have been (prior to this weekend’s incident) hard at work moving Bing Travel to the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform. But again, given the complexity of this service and our desire to do this in a way that is invisible to customers, this process takes time and must be done carefully. We expect to have the move completed by early fall."

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Seattle data center fire knocked out Bing Travel at Microsoft

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