Microsoft search engine Bing suffers brief outage

WASHINGTON: 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 per cent 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 per cent share.

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

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