If you try to go to Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, you may be out of luck. It seems to be currently down and out.

A quick search on Twitter confirms that Bing is down for everyone.

Update: Bing at 10:11pm (EST) tweeted that they are back up and they are indeed correct.

Postscript #2: The Bing blog explained the reason for the outage:

Bing.com was down between about 6:30 and 7:00 PM Pacific Time on Dec 3, 2009. During this time, users were either unable to get to the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results page.

The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.

As soon as the issue was detected, 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.

We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing. We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Satya Nadella Senior Vice President, Online Services Division

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Top News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz