Microsoft’s Bing search engine went offline this evening, greeting visitors with an error message instead of a pretty picture and a search field–for somewhere between thirty minutes and nearly an hour, depending on which report you believe. I don’t see any mention of the outage, its end, or the culprit at Bing’s blog, but as TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out, a member of the Bing team tweeted about it a bit. And the official Bing Twitterfeed says it’ll share details when it has them.

The outage’s timing isn’t auspicious–it comes a day after Bing’s big press event and rollout of new features. But at least it’s in good company: Google had a weird hour-long period back in January when it thought the entire Web was dangerous, and Gmail has suffered multiple extended hiccups this year. I wonder what the biggest Web site is that’s never been suffered for more than, oh, five minutes of unplanned downtime?

[UPDATE: Bing has explained the problem–unintended consequences of a configuration change.)

 
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