Microsoft has apologized for a technical glitch that brought down its Bing search engine site for about 30 minutes late Thursday.
Between 6:30 and 7:00 Pacific Time Web surfers trying to access Bing either received an error message or their queries were returned with an incomplete results page, according to a blog posted on the Bing site late Thursday by Satya Nadella, senior vice president of research and development in Microsoft's Online Service Division.
"The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," Nadella said in the blog. "As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use Bing.com"
"We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing," Nadella said in his blog. "We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again."
The outage comes as Microsoft is working furiously to attract more users to the Bing site in an effort to gain market share against search rival Google. In October Bing's share of U.S. Web searches stood at 9.9 percent while Google retained a 65.4 percent share, according to Comscore, which tracks Internet activity.
The outage also came one day after Bing launched Bing Maps Data to compete with Google Maps.
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