Microsoft search engine Bing suffers brief outage

US software giant Microsoft has blamed a problem during testing for a half-hour outage of its new Web search engine Bing.

US software giant Microsoft has blamed a problem during testing for a half-hour outage of its new Web search engine Bing.

In a post on the Bing blog, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services division, said Bing.com was down from 6:30 pm to 7:00 pm Pacific time on Thursday (0230 GMT to 0300 GMT on Friday).

- During this time, users were either unable to get to the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results pages - Nadella wrote.

- The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences - he said.

- As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior - he said.

Nedella said Microsoft engineers were - running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again. -

Microsoft launched Bing in June in a bid to rival Google in the lucrative search and advertising market and the outage came a day after it released new features including a revamped version of Bing Maps with street views.

Bing had a nearly 10 percent share of the US Internet search market at the end of October, according to Web tracking firm comScore, trailing far behind Google, which dominates the market with a 65 percent share.

Yahoo!, Microsoft's search partner, saw its market share decline 0.8 percent in October to 18.0 percent.

Yahoo! and Microsoft unveiled a 10-year Web search and advertising partnership in July that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google.