HP and Microsoft’s Black Friday promise of 40 percent refunds on everything in HP's online store got plagued with outage. When Microsoft Live Search Cashback came back up the refund offered was lowered to 3% at that!

What happened? A significant spike in traffic caused the system to go down so the databases and indexes that support Microsoft Live Search Cashback had to be rebuild and redeployed! Of course this took some time, but it’s all fixed now.

If you made a HP purchase through Live Search Cashback last Friday and got a 3% refund while expecting 40%, Microsoft will give you the full refund if you follow up on it through the support site:

We want to respond to those of you who've commented about your problems using cashback last Friday. For a few hours on Friday, November 28, Live Search cashback experienced an unexpected outage. If you completed a purchase that day, you can follow up on a cashback rebate by contacting Microsoft at https://support.search.live.com/. Be sure to have the order number and the email address provided for the transaction.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Let’s hope they are prepared for more traffic now, esp. with the new Live Search Instant Cashback feature for eligible shoppers on eBay! It does explain somewhat why we still haven’t seen the promised roll out to other markets :(

Live Search : Black Friday cashback blackout