Bing crashes for 30 minutes after 'configuration change'

The software giant apologised for the outage, which happened in between about 2.30am and 3.00am GMT, returning incomplete results pages to users, or preventing them from accessing the site altogether.

Users were presented with a code-filled error message that said: "Oops. This isn't the page you wanted! Try this: Refresh the page. If you get this message again, please check back later."

Satya Nadella, senior vice-president, online services division, at Microsoft, said on the Official Bing Blog: "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 behaviour. 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."

Twitter users seized the opportunity to highlight Google's superiority to Bing. Tweets included:

"@OutrageousSteve: #bing FAIL"

"@Viper007Bond: Another reason I use Google instead of Bing: their site actually stays up."

"@Scobleizer: Wow, @bing has been down for at least seven minutes. Has that EVER happened to @google? How embarrassing."

Two weeks ago eBay crashed amid a surge in activity as customers searched for Christmas bargains. The site was down for several hours on Saturday November 21, causing vendors to lose sales.

This article was first published on brandrepublic.com