A marketing website, part of a multi-million dollar campaign by Microsoft and Unisys to get customers to switch from Unix, is turning into a major embarrassment.

It was revealed on Monday that www.wehavethewayout.com was powered by Unix kit and that, when Microsoft switched it to Internet Information Server software on Tuesday, the site crashed completely.

Anyone accessing the site sees either an all-white screen or an 'Error 403' authorisation message.

Describing Unix as an expensive trap which boxes IT managers in, the site stated: "It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."

Originally the site ran on web servers powered by FreeBSD, an open source version of Unix, as well as on the Unix-based Apache web server.

Netcraft, which tracks the software running on various sites, detected that the site switched over to Internet Information Server software on Tuesday, the same day as the outage.

At time of this story going online the site was still down.