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Microsoft has blamed an outage of its Bing search engine on a “configuration change” during testing – the latest setback in its challenge to much larger rival Google.
Bing was down for around half an hour last night, during which time users were unable to access the site, or their searches returned incomplete results.
“The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences,” Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services division, said in a statement.
“As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior.”
“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.”
Bing recently tried to gain an advantage over Google by offering to pay news organisations to remove their content from the rival search engine, following complaints from some that Google allowed users to access too much free content. However, Google has now said it will allow publishers to limit the number of stories users can access for free.
