Microsoft Bing Goes Down Due to Mistake

Microsoft's Bing search engine went down on Thursday, displaying a browser error message to users who tried to access the 'decision making engine.'

Microsoft yesterday acknowledged a service disruption affecting its Bing search engine with a series of tweets from its official Bing twitter account. "We're aware and looking into it...stay tuned," was the first message from Redmond confirming that all was not right in Bingland. Shortly after, a second message relayed that everything was back to normal. A third message promised details once Microsoft had figured out what had gone wrong.

In a blog post Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President for Online Services, explained what had happened. Nadella detailed that the cause of the outage was "a configuration change during some internet testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences." Check out the full post below.

^{"The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.}

^{As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.}

^{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."}

CNet reports it was "at least 45 minutes." Did you have any problems with Bing last night? Let us know in the comments below!

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