In case you missed it--and most of you probably did--Microsoft's search engine was offline for about 30 minutes on Thursday evening. What's noteworthy here isn't that fact that a Web service was down briefly (just ask ) but that the short-lived outage resulted in a flurry of media coverage, including a couple of stories right here on PCWorld.com.

In fact, a quick check of Google News reveals numerous reports on Bing's minor glitch--and not just from tech news sites and bloggers, the folks you'd expect to cover such things. Mainstream media outlets including the BBC, UPI, and Seattle Times did as well. The Washington Post's site also had the story, but it was really a repost of .

The updates continued Friday morning when Microsoft's Satya Nadella, senior vice president of online service, apologized for the outage in a . The glitch was caused by "a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," she wrote.

Good or Bad for Bing?

I'm sure that some critics will see the Bing outage as an embarrassment for Microsoft, which is busting its hump to build a search engine good enough to steal a few users away from Google. But I think Redmond should be pleased with the response the Bing glitch has generated. It shows the news media have Bing in their sites, and are taking it seriously as a Google competitor.