Microsoft briefly breaks Bing

Microsoft's new Bing search engine was unavailable for around half an hour last night.

The company said that the outage, which occurred at around 6.30pm Pacific time, was caused by "a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences".

In a statement on a company blog senior vice-president Satya Nadella added: "As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back... Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use Bing".

"We are running a post mortem... to prevent anything like this from happening again."

According to the Huffington Post, users accessing Bing during the outage were presented with an error page stating "Oops" and "This isn't the page you wanted!"

Internet users were quick to criticise the service, voicing their displeasure on services such as Twitter with the hashtag #bingfail.

"When was the last time you saw Google down?", asked one user.

Bing was announced in May and replaces Microsoft's previous search service, Live Search.