It looked like things were headed this way, but now it's official: Microsoft and HP won't be reviving the 40 percent cashback promotion that they offered HP's online shoppers a week ago -- despite the fact that Microsoft Live's Search Cashback Black Friday outage prevented many people from taking advantage of it.

"There have been lots of questions on whether the 40% off HP promotion on Black Friday will be restarted," wrote Rajat Taneja, Microsoft's general manager of worldwide commercial search, in a post this afternoon on the Live Search blog. "While we were hoping to be able to do that, we are sorry to report that it will not be restarted."

Shoppers had been holding out hope that the companies would rerun the promotion, based on a statement a Microsoft representative made to CNet News.com about such plans. As noted previously, the company says that statement was mistaken.

Today's announcement comes after a series of missteps by Microsoft on the issue. Many of the HP shoppers who did get through to the Cashback site last Friday ended up getting 3 percent cashback instead of the promised 40 percent.

"This means all of the HP customers that spent hours trying to access the Cash Back deal, but couldn’t get past the CAPTCHA screen to activate the discount are out of luck," wrote Xavier Lanier of Notebooks.com, who reported on the news earlier today. "Those that received the elusive 3% discount will get the full discount by the end of this weekend, but based on Microsoft’s promises I’m not holding my breath."

On the Live Search Blog today, Taneja apologized for the problems and offered these updates for people affected by them, including those who didn't receive any confirmation of their Cashback purchases:

"We’ve been working diligently to correct the issues. We’ve been in constant communication with the customer support team about those orders that were incorrectly processed, and we have now reached out to all affected customers whose email addresses and purchase details we have on file. These customers should see the correct cashback amount reflected in their accounts by the end of the weekend. ...

"If there are any remaining customers whose cashback purchases haven’t yet been acknowledged via email, whether from HP or any other merchant, we invite them to contact us at cashbk@microsoft.com with their order number and email address. We are committed to responding to all remaining inquiries within 48 hours and to ensuring the appropriate cashback amounts are credited for all eligible purchases."

Taneja concluded by wishing readers "a stress-free remainder of your holiday shopping season."

But the first comment on the post is anything but calm.

"How can you promise to rerun this promotion and then NOT do so?" it reads. "That is horrible!!!!  What are you doing to make things right for the consumers who spent all day trying to get thru on the promotion but kept getting errors from server load issues and the url not connecting correctly???  You need to KEEP YOUR WORD, or get out the search business."