Bing Busted, Briefly

Microsoft's Bing search engine was offline Thursday evening, experiencing an outage of between 45 minutes and an hour. Outages for major search engines are relatively rare, and the downtime was quickly noted around Twitter and tech news sites. Microsoft's Bing team acknowledged the outage, and later confirmed the site's return to service. "Details to come once we have the full picture," Microsoft said on its Twitter account for Bing.

UPDATE: Microsoft has provided a post-mortem on the outage. "The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," the Bing team wrote. "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."