An outage experienced Thursday evening by Microsoft Bing was caused by "a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," according to a post by Satya Nadella, the executive in charge of engineering for the company's search engine.

Those consequences could include a blow to the company's reputation as it tries to catch Google in the search market, as noted by CNet News.com's Ina Fried, who was covering the events as they happened last night. The outage of the main Bing search engine lasted for at least 45 minutes, according to the CNet post.

"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," Microsoft's Nadella wrote in his post. "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."

Microsoft earlier this week rolled out a series of upgrades on Bing, focused primarily on new mapping applications.

The company's Bing Travel site suffered an extended outage in July, due to the Fisher Plaza fire, but that outage did not affect the company's main Bing site.