Microsoft's main search site suffered an outage at 6:25 pm on Thursday, which has let down Microsoft's image in the search area.

The users, who were trying to search for the Bing. com on the internet were getting a browser error message instead of a search bar. Site was unable to provide service for at least 45 minutes before being restored around 7:10 p. m. PST.

Microsoft's senior vice president, Mr. Satya Nandella said that this mistake caused people unable to find the site or having their queries returned unanswered.

Microsoft states that the configuration change made to the site during testing, caused the site to suffer outage.

Through the Bing blog site, Mr Nandella said, "As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Detecting the problem and fixing it took about 30 minutes."

This site failure is regarded as a blow to the efforts of Microsoft to position Bing as a serious rival to Google. It is evident from the messages, which started appearing on microblogging site Twitter, from the time when the mistake became apparent.

The outage has occurred in a week when Microsoft announced new search abilities for Bing as well as improved mapping.