Microsoft has confirmed that it's search engine Bing.com was down for half an hour with users were either unable to get to the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results page.

Apparently the cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences. A spokesman for Microsoft said that as soon as the problem was noticed 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.

The outage came just a day after Microsoft announced a variety of changes to Bing, including added detail for some results and improved mapping tricks so we guess the changes must have come as a result of those upgrades.

On the bonus side people actually noticed that Bing was down. Many people think that Microsoft's search engine is largely ignored despite Redmond's large advertising campaign.