Microsoft has rolled out a partnership with eBay to give consumers instant cash rebates. But the software giant is still reeling from a major outage that left Black Friday shoppers frustrated with its program.
Microsoft announced the cashback concept in May, hoping for an edge in the search-engine wars through ad-funded cash rebates for customers who find and purchase products using Live Search. The program partners with brands like eBay, Barnes & Noble.com, Overstock.com, Sears and Zappos.com, and includes more than 10 million product offers from more than 700 merchants.
Black Friday was to be a big day for Microsoft, but the software giant ended up with a black eye when the cashback server went down as consumers looked to cash in on specials like a 40 percent incentive from HP’s online store.
Microsoft Apologizes
In the wake of frustrated user comments, Rajat Taneja, general manager of worldwide commercial search, responded early Monday evening. He confirmed the unexpected outage on Black Friday and apologized for the inconvenience.
“A significant spike in traffic caused the system to go down for several hours on Friday. The downtime was partly related to investigating the issue and partly to rebuilding and redeploying the databases and indexes that support Microsoft Live Search cashback,” Taneja wrote on the Live Search blog. “The issues that caused Friday’s problem have been resolved. We’re confident we won’t have further problems.”
Users who completed a purchase that day, he said, can follow up on a cashback rebate by contacting Microsoft’s Live Search support with an order number and e-mail address used in the transaction.
Microsoft’s stated goal with cashback is to make Live Search the most rewarding commercial search destination on the Web. Chairman Bill Gates is sure cashback will help advertisers drive more online sales while giving consumers a new way to stretch their dollars….