An electrical fire at downtown Seattle’s Fisher Plaza has interrupted service at a long roster of Web sites, including Microsoft’s Bing Travel and Authorize.net

Fisher Communications said in statement Friday that the problems at the Fisher Plaza data center started in a garage-level electrical room at approximately 11:10 p.m. Thursday night. Fisher said the cause of the fire remains under investigation.

Some of the affected sites put up messages explaining what had happened. “The blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers,” a message on Bing Travel said. “This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there is no impact to any other aspect of Bing.”

Bing Travel said it’s working hard to restore service, and set 5 p.m. PDT Friday as the target time for resumption of service (it did not meet that goal). “In the meantime, you may use Microsoft travel partner Orbitz for your travel needs,” the site said.

TechFlash reporter Todd Bishop has arrived on the scene and is posting updates.

Bishop notes that this isn’t the first outage at the Fisher Plaza data center–service went offline last year as well after an electrical fire. The Fisher Plaza Web site also was down as of this writing, but a cached version says:

Fisher Plaza is the only mission-critical business community in the Northwest combining Class A office, data center, colocation, and retail space with 21st century communications and media services.

“Pretty frustrating,” writes one TechFlash poster. “I understand problems happen, but this the second time in a year that we have had to explain to our customers about an outage. This is supposed to be a ‘world class’ facility. Brings up a lot of questions that are still unanswered from the last outage.”

Among other sites impacted–see Kyle Mulka’s blog for a list of affected sites and their current status–online real estate service Redfin suffered an outage last night, but was back up Friday morning, according to TechFlash. Fisher Plaza is also home to Seattle’s KOMO-TV and KOMONews.com, which reports that the server farm fire also impacted television and radio broadcasts. As a result, KOMO Radio and KOMO-TV are broadcasting Friday from remote locations.

Verizon Communications spokesman Jon Davies said the fire also temporarily disrupted Verizon’s Seattle-area DSL service. About 50,000 customers in Oregon and Washington lost Internet connectivity, Davies told TechFlash.

On Friday afternoon, Fisher said it’s bringing in electrical generators to restore power to the building, at which time it can further assess the situation. “The company is working to restore normal service to its customers as soon as possible,” Fisher said.

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Spot the difference: Kayak has accused Microsoft of copying the look and feel of its search engine with its Bing Travel website

According to Wired, Kayak has sent Microsoft a letter detailing its concerns about similarities between its own website and

Bing’s travel search facility.

“We have contacted them through the official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak,” said Robert Birge, Kayak’s chief marketing officer. “From the look and feel of their travel products, they seem to agree with our approach to the market.”

Both Kayak and Bing Travel feature a results page and travel itinerary that users can tailor by checking tick boxes and moving selection sliders. A number of technology experts reviewing Microsoft’s new search engine shortly after its May launch observed the similarities to Kayak, including Wired itself, which described the travel interface as “uncomfortably close to Kayak’s”.

But Whitney Burke, director of Bing, has denied Kayak’s claims. “We are discussing the matter with Kayak,” she said. “Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.”

Bing is continuing to enjoy an increasing share of the search market, in the United States at least. According to the latest figures from comScore, Bing accounts for 16.7 per cent of search traffic in the US in the week commencing June 8.

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Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft’s new search decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google. The company’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google’s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo). Are people just test-driving Bing en masse, or does this have anything to do with the fact Bing was forced upon IE6 users (now fixed)? Or is it just because it’s that good and the advertising is already working?

Either way, the jump Bing appears to have made sincelaunching merely a couple of days ago is significant, and the drop you see in Google’s share even more so. Are we witnessing the birth of the first true Google challenger or is this nothing but launch momentum bound to fade away? (StatCounter claims to measure the search and browsing behavior of over two million users and says it tracks in excess of ten billion pageloads per month over its network of three million websites.)

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