The Internet, blogosphere and Twitter were abuzz last week when Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, went down for 30 to 45 minutes last Thursday evening. Users were either unable to reach the search site or were met with an error message. The official statement offered from the Microsoft camp was that the outage was caused by a “configuration change” made to the site during testing, which resulted in “unfortunate and unintended” consequences.

The outage comes at a bad time for Bing. Early last week, officials announced changes and updates to their site, along with improved mapping capabilities. The new mapping platform includes Microsoft’s Silverlight multimedia Web application and “Photosynth” technology, which allows users to post interior pictures of businesses and attractions. Among other features are Twitter posts, blogs and newspaper articles relevant to nearby locations or addresses. The newest enhancements are Bing’s most recent attempts to challenge rival Google’s dominance in the marketplace.

Although the new mapping platform continues to generate buzz, yesterday’s outage is a subject now dominating the blogs and news forums. It’s still too early to determine the widespread impact the outage will have on Bing’s image or its continued battle to grow and gain market share from Google and Yahoo! However, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a major search engine has faced a glitch or two. Earlier this year, both the Gmail and Google news platforms were down for extended periods of time. Though the outages caused some anger and frustration among users, the long-term damage was minimal, as Google continues to dominate the search engine market.