For Internet users, Black Friday was supposed to be about buying and cashing back, but Microsoft’s Live Search cashback machine apparently broke down just as customers “barged in” to make some early morning purchases.

According to a blog posting, the unexpected outage occurred due to a significant spike in traffic, which caused the system to go down for several hours. It took quite a while for it to come back to life, but apparently that was related to investigating the issue and rebuilding and deploying the databases and indexes that support Microsoft Live Search Cashback.

The blog posting confirms the issues have been solved and that there shouldn’t be any more problems. In the meantime all lucky users who’ve completed a purchase on Friday, November 28, and got nothing or too little back, can contact Microsoft at https://support.search.live.com/.

Microsoft introduced Search Live cashback earlier this year, in an attempt to catch up with rival search giants Google and Yahoo. The program basically offers ad-funded cash rebates to whoever searches and purchases something through Microsoft Live Search Cashback.

It has been described in many ways, including “the most rewarding commercial search destination on the Web” and “a new of (for users) to stretch their dollars” (Bill Gates), but at the end of the day, it still looks like a desperate attempt to pay users to stick with Microsoft Live Search.

However that may be, the degree of frustration among cahsback users was quite large on Friday. Microsoft tried to make up for it by cutting down the waiting time for cashbacks from 60 days to instant. However, that service “will be eligible for some users, but not all users.” Microsoft did not specify the criteria by which users are chosen, which raises a big question mark on its entire Cashback program.