• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 2, 2015

Yahoo's search engine went down Friday following Microsoft's search engine Bing, but both are up now after recovering.

Users typing search.yahoo.com got an error message that Yahoo's engineers were working to resolve the issue. Bing powers Yahoo search under a 10-year deal announced in 2009. The outage lasted more than four hours. It's not a good way to start a new year.

At the time of the outage a Yahoo spokesperson said "we are aware that Yahoo search is unavailable to some users. Our engineers are working to restore the service at the earliest," but did not provide specifics as to the cause.

In fact, both companies declined to provide details. A Microsoft spokesperson said "This morning, some of our customers experienced a brief, isolated services interruption which has now been resolved." 

Reuters reports a bad code update at Yahoo, citing a person familiar with the outage.