A half-hour outage caused Microsoft’s search engine Bing to drop off the internet in the early hours of Thursday, 3 December.
The company has apologised for the outage, which had web surfers be greeted with an error message on the search engine’s site.
A “configuration change” made to the site during testing was the cause of the outage, Microsoft said in a statement. This, it said, had “unfortunate and unintended consequences” which included making the site unavailable.
The glitch led to people either being unable to find the site or having their queries returned unanswered, Satya Nadella, one of Microsoft’s senior vice-presidents in its Online Services Division, wrote on the Bing blog.
“As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behaviour,” wrote Nadella, who added that the problem was corrected in about 30 minutes.
Microsoft was looking into the root of the incident in order to take preventative measures to prevent such an incident from happening again, Nadella wrote.
Photo: The Bing site.
