UPDATE, January 2, 2014, 5:00 p.m. PT Yahoo's search engine is back online.
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Yahoo's search engine is down, after an outage that took down Microsoft's Bing search engine
The site began experiencing a disruption at 4:26 p.m ET, according to downdetector.com, a website that monitors service disruptions on major websites. Yahoo Mail, Flickr and other Yahoo services appear to be unaffected.
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Search.yahoo.com currently has a message that "engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue." A Yahoo spokesperson gave Mashable the following statement:
We are aware that Yahoo search is unavailable to some users. Our engineers are working to restore the service at the earliest.
The source of the outage is not yet clear, though it appears to be related to earlier problems with Microsoft's Bing search engine. Bing search reportedly experienced a brief outage earlier Friday afternoon. As of this writing Bing was back online.
Yahoo's search engine is powered by Microsoft so it's likely that problems with Bing would affect Yahoo as well. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the disruption saying, "some of our customers experienced a brief, isolated services interruption which has now been resolved." The spokesperson did not say what caused the original problem.
As with other outages, disgruntled users took to Twitter to voice their complaints.
All three Bing users distraught at it's outage pic.twitter.com/i6llB9Tl54— Havokmon (@Havokmon) January 2, 2015
@Bing is down, which means @Yahoo search is also borked. Internet is crickets. Insert @google in this sentence and internet is PANIC!!— Sara Yates (@TheDailySara) January 2, 2015
Until I looked up Yahoo Search being down, I had no idea they don't do search anymore. Search powered by Bing. Who?— Stefan Lubinski (@stefanlubinski) January 2, 2015
At least dozens are inconvenienced.. "@dbarkin: Yahoo search engine down affecting hundreds"— Drew Brooks (@DrewBrooks) January 2, 2015
The timing of the outage is particularly bad for Mozilla's Firefox users. Mozilla switched its default search engine to Yahoo in November, after a 10-year deal with Google. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has focused much of her efforts on improving search since taking over the role as the Sunnyvale-based company's lead executive.
UPDATED 3:25 p.m. PT to include Yahoo statement