Trouble arose when Microsoft’s Windows 10 users found their desktop search bars broken – and the explanation they got was unnerving. On February 6th, Windows 10 search bars displayed a black bar instead of search results. Microsoft explained a server-side error was at fault, but the response raised questions over the type of data Windows 10 was recording and sending out through the internet.

After fixing the issue, Microsoft suggested those who still had the issue reboot their devices or manually deactivate the search bar through Task Manager. The fix proved not to work across the board, and many were puzzled about how a server-side issue affected people searching for local files on their own computers. Many criticized Microsoft for its lack of transparency with an issue that affected so many of its users.

Microsoft Latest wrote, “The outage reveals the holes in cloud computing’s atmosphere and Microsoft’s aggressive cloud approach. Microsoft is apparently dependent on its partners for Windows Search’s ability to operate and outages like this can prevent all search results from showing up on desktops.” Microsoft has been pushing towards unifying searches across its products. The tech giant discontinued the support of Windows 7 and will do the same to Windows 8 in 2023. Now, users have to upgrade to Windows 10 or put their systems at risk, as any faults that are found by hackers will not be patched.

Windows 10 has had a recent string of high-profile issues that have made the move away from Windows 7 difficult. Across the past few months, Windows 10 users have had to deal with a broken file explorer, strange CPU spikes, and discolored desktops on top of security vulnerabilities related to the interconnected nature of the service. August of last year saw Microsoft warning people of “wormable” Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities affected all versions of Windows 10. That’s where devices could be weaponized to transmit malware from computer to computer, without any action from the user.

While cloud-based systems have advantages to their classic counterparts, the way Microsoft has linked even local searches to its server has proven problematic. Before, systems consisted of everyone on a single network, like an office connecting to the same server. Since every copy of Windows 10 is connected to Microsoft’s servers, your computer can see issues because of something that happened half a world away. Microsoft is investigating options to prevent the search engine issue from happening again. While routine updating is a good way to plug any holes hackers might find, many of the issues that have arisen are a direct result of having such a server-dependent operating system.

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Source: Microsoft Latest