Microsoft has apologised for a brief outage which saw its search site Bing disappear from the internet. The outage lasted for nearly 30 minutes in the early hours of 3rd December.

A Microsoft statement said the outage was caused by a configuration change made to the site during testing which had unfortunate and unintended consequences which included making the site unavailable.

Writing on the Bing blog Satya Nadella, one of Microsoft's senior vice presidents in its Online Services Division, said the mistake led to people either being unable to find the site or having their queries returned unanswered.

As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior.

The site is running as normal today with no issues.