Microsoft's Bing search engine suffered a setback in the early hours of the morning after a global outage made the service unavailable to users.
For a period of roughly 30 minutes, visitors to the site were greeted with an error message and the inability to carry out search requests. The downtime, albeit brief, could be a blow to bing's high-profile attempt to usurp Google as the leader in online search.
Shortly after the site went down, reports of the problem quickly circulated on Twitter, resulting in Microsoft Bing engineer, Tony Chor, Tweeting that he and his team were "working on bringing Bing back up".
Microsoft has since acknowledged that a "configuration chance during some internal testing" was to blame for the search engine outage.
"As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behaviour," said Microsoft's senior vice president of its online services division, Satya Nadella.
Earlier this week, Microsoft revamped its Bing Maps mapping service, and the software giant has confirmed that Maps and other applications weren't affected by the outage.
"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," adds Nadella.
