Bing Maps is lost on the Internet

Is Microsoft's Bing having a meltdown? One of my colleagues just alerted me to troubles accessing Bing Maps. He gets an error message, as do two other BetaNews staffers. We're located in different parts of the country using various cable or DSL services. This is not a localized problem.

The outage appears to be broader than Bing Maps. I also can't get to Bing News, while someone else couldn't get Search, which works for me. Colleague Tim Conneally pinged Bing Maps while I wrote the first paragraph and got repeated timeouts. Are you having Bing troubles today?

While I wrote the paragraphs above, colleague Ed Oswald got this notice on the Bing home page: "Bing services aren't available right now. We're working to restore all services as soon as possible. We know you want to get back to searching. Please check back soon".

Now I can't access Bing at all.

Update 1:42 pm EDT: I've got Bing back, as do some of readers. Do you?