Redmond, Washington — Barely a day after beautifying Bing with various enhancements, including the beta version of an improved mapping service, Microsoft had to apologize for a widespread outage that kept the search engine offline for about 30 minutes late last week, a sign that Microsoft’s effort to challenge Google’s search supremacy remains vital.
During the breakdown, Bing went blank between 6:30 and 7:00 PM PT, users either could not get the site to load at all, or they received substituted result pages for their search queries, Microsoft said.
In a post on the Bing blog, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services division, confirmed that Bing.com was inaccessible from 6:30 pm to 7:00 pm Pacific time on Thursday (0230 GMT to 0300 GMT on Friday).
Microsoft communicated the outage in a blog post, stating, “the cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.”
“During this time, users were either unable to access the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results pages,” Nadella wrote. “As soon as the issue was noticed, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior,” Nadella, said in the blog post. “Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.
Bing is the third most popular search engine in the U.S., as measured by Net Applications and Stat Counter, where it is used by almost 10%, according to comScore’s October figures, ongoing user interest is something to celebrate. Yahoo ranked second with 18 percent and Google stood all alone in first place with 65.4 percent.
Introduced in late May and backed by a broad and belligerent marketing campaign, Bing is the latest iteration of Microsoft’s search engine and expectations for it are very high.
Nedella said Microsoft engineers were “running a post mortem to determine how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.” “We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing,” he added.
Microsoft launched Bing in June in a bid to compete with 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.
Nevertheless, unlike earlier breakdown at Google, which usually precipitate hand-wringing about the reliability of cloud services, Bing’s brief bit nap does not appear to have amplified anxiety about Microsoft’s cloud services.