• eWeek, Friday, December 4, 2009 2:55 PM

Microsoft is apologizing for Bing's half hour of downtime on Thursday, which it's attributing to a system error. During the outage, users were either unable to access the search engine or else received incomplete results to search queries. The outage came a day after Microsoft announced new features for Bing, including updated Bing Maps and a visual search that integrates Twitter and Facebook feeds.

"The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," Satya Nadella, SVP of Microsoft's Online Services Division, wrote on the official Bing blog. In what it says "could be construed as an additional irony," an eWeek analysis piece on Thursday morning posited that Bing could gain market share if Google's search engine experienced repeated outages. Commenters on that article even suggested that server outages could also happen to Bing.

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