Microsoft suffered an embarrassment last week when its highly touted Bing search engine went down for half an hour.

The outage occurred in the same week that Microsoft was promoting enhancements to Bing, including the beta version of an improved mapping service. During the outage on Thursday, users either couldn't get the site to load or they received a truncated results pages for their search queries.

"The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, in an official blog.

Nadella said that as soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back and 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," he said.

He said Microsoft is conducting a post mortem to find out how the software and processes can be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again. Microsoft has been spending heavily on advertising and promotion to gain market share in the search business. It now ranks third. In October, it owned 9.9 percent of the U.S. search market, up from 8 percent in May, according to comScore. Yahoo ranked second with 18 percent and Google held first place with 65.4 percent.

It's not the first time a search engine has gone down in the middle of the day. Google has experienced several outages in the last several months. It's the cost of doing business with these giant engines and a component that IT executives must plan for at any time.

The answer for IT businesses is to have a backup and be ready to shift to a different server in the event of an outage.

For more on Bing:
- see this CIOzone.com article
- see this Computerworld article
- and this InformationWeek article

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