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Microsoft's new search engine Bing went offline in the early hours of December 3rd when it suffered a power outage during testing causing it to go offline for nearly 30 minutes. The BBC reports that anyone who attempted to access the “decision engine” during its down time was presented with an error message.

Microsoft later released a statement saying that the power outage was caused by a “configuration change” which was made live during testing. This change they said had “unfortunate and unintended consequences” which led to the search engines half hour down time.

One of Microsoft’s senior vice presidents Satya Nadella wrote on the Bing blog later this morning saying that the mistake led to people being unable to find the site of having their search queries returned to them unanswered.

Mr Nadella wrote "As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior,"

Mr Nadella added that Microsoft was looking into the cause of the down time to find out what needs to be done to stop such an incident reoccurring.

Microsoft has been working hard over the past 4 months to position their “decision engine” as a serious rival to the search giants Google, and this unscheduled downtime will dent this image.

Users found that not all Bing services were rendered completely useless by the unexpected power outage, with Bing Maps still being functional. The Bing Maps beta site received an major update earlier this week to allow it to offer a range of new applications to users, including real-time traffic feeds and 360 degree panoramas of locations.