Carl Malamud, a well respected technologist, author, and public domain advocate posted on Twitter that Bing’s spider “got a timeout” by not playing nice with the IRS database. It seems that BingBot was a bit too aggressive on their site and they decided to block Bing for some time.

Here is the tweet:

This caught the attention of Google’s Matt Cutts and it drove Carl to add more details:

It isn’t clear exactly which site Carl decided to block. He referenced the IRS database. Bug clearly he is calling BingBot a not well-behaved bot, at least not on April 25th.

Forum discussion at Twitter.