04 December 2009 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

Bing goes offline for 30 minutes

Microsoft's 'decision engine' Bing suffered a power outage in the early hours of December 3, when testing caused the site to go offline for nearly 30 minutes.

The BBC reports that anyone who attempted to access the search engine during that time received an error message. A statement released by Microsoft explained that the outage was due to a "configuration change" that occurred during testing, which led to these "unfortunate and unintended consequences."

Satya Nadella, a senior vice president in Microsoft's Online Services Division, addressed the issue on the Bing blog, where he explained: "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. 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 was followed on Twitter, where Bing engineer Tony Chor kept users informed of the team's progress in bringing the site back online. Users found that not all aspects of the Bing service were rendered unavailable by the configuration changes, with Bing Maps still being operational. The Bing Maps beta site received an overhaul earlier this week to offer a range of new applications to users, including real-time traffic feeds and 360 degree panoramas of locations.

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