Gareth Jones

For nearly 30 minutes in the early hours of December 3rd, anyone visiting Microsoft’s search engine was greeted by an error message.

A Microsoft statement said the outage was caused by a “configuration change” made to the site during testing. This, it said, had “unfortunate and unintended consequences” which included making the site unavailable.

Detecting the problem and fixing it took about 30 minutes, he said.

First question – why are people testing changes on a LIVE site? Doesn’t the largest company on earth have a test server somewhere?

Second question – why did it take 30 minutes to check the effect that this change had had on the site? When you change some of your code, don’t you test it immediately?

Final question – Where I work, if Google goes down someone notices pretty much immediately and yet no-one at Microsoft noticed Bing being down for 30 minutes? I guess a possible explanation for this is that they all use Google over there, but even then the developers responsible for this change should have been able to ignore Google for a second and test their changes on Bing before the support calls started coming in!

Internet Explorer 6 was released back in 2001 and is therefore 8 year old technology. There are two newer versions of the browser available and of course there’s Firefox which is better than both of those, and yet many people are still using this ancient browser.

Explorer 6 provides web developers with a host of problems because of its non-compliance with various standards; it’s not secure; it’s slow; it’s feature-poor.

Some people feel so strongly about getting everyone to upgrade to a newer, less-broken version of Internet Explorer that websites have been set up specifically to promote this goal. The guys over at http://ie6update.com have even created plugins that can be installed on websites that will prompt its users to update their browser if they’re using IE6, and in support of this I have installed the WordPress version of the plugin on all of my websites.

If you get a message informing you that your browser is out of date and needs to be updated, do not be alarmed! Instead, please follow the link to Microsoft’s website to download the latest version of Internet Explorer.