It would appear Microsoft and Bing have run into a bit of a problem. I mean besides the fact that Bing is not quite as useful a search engine of course. Then again, this issue will only affect those smart dotTechies out there using a secure connection.

A poorly configured X.509 certificate is causing serious errors when trying to connect to Bing through a secure (HTTPS) connection. Akamai, the company that handles Bing, made a substantial boo-boo here. When trying to connect to Bing through a secure connection, even when using Internet Explorer, users will be presented with a security warning about the validity of the site’s certificate.

As of 11:30am Eastern time this morning, the issue is still plaguing Microsoft’s search engine.

The error message mentions that the certificate is only valid for the following host names: a248.e.akamai.net , *.akamaihd.net , *.akamaihd-staging.net.

In layman’s terms, somebody screwed up bigtime here, and the situation clearly needs to be remedied as soon as possible. I’m willing to bet remarkably few people actually rely on Bing as their main search engine, which kind of dampens the severity of the situation. If this were happening with Google’s site, for example, then we’d have a detrimental issue on our hands.

Also, even fewer people probably browse with a secure connection, but I’m sure most Dottechies out there do however (wink, wink).

Like I mentioned above, the issue is still evident, but it appears the problem isn’t just with Bing. Other Akamai web customers like NBA.com seem to be having similar issues with the security certificates.

Oh well, looks like we’ll just have to browse Bing with unsecure connections for the time being like everyone else in the world. Or, we could, you know, turn to Microsoft’s opposition.

[via Ars Technica]