MSN Messenger goes dark (or 1 Degree of seperation, .Net leaves 75 Million without service)

CNET ^ | Stefanie Olsen

[HamiltonJay]

MSN Messenger goes dark

By Stefanie Olsen Staff Writer, CNET News.com January 6, 2003, 12:13 PM PT

Microsoft's Instant Messenger service went down early Monday, affecting up to 75 million people worldwide who sign on to the service to chat with friends and co-workers. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker lost much of its power for six hours to the .Net Messenger Service, the backend component that runs all of its IM clients including Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger. Bob Visse, MSN's director of marketing, said that the source of the problem was as yet undetected, but the outage was "fairly widespread."

"It's a worldwide outage, and most customers are affected," he said. "We're investigating it, but we do not know what the issue is."

Visse said the company started receiving its first outage reports at about 6 a.m. PST. Service was back up at noon. While some people had their access restored earlier, others were still in the dark.

"Currently, myself and a few others are unable to access MSN Messenger," said one user in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "Not a big issue personally as we just went over to Yahoo messenger."

The outage comes on the heels of problems with Microsoft's .Net Passport servers that bumped some subscribers from their online accounts late last week. Passport, the linchpin of many of MSN's personalized services, including Hotmail, suffered a brief time-out because of server networking issues, according to the company.

MSN users on Monday also complained of an inability to access Messenger and Hotmail in recent days. But Visse said that the company has not detected any problems with the Web-based e-mail service. He added that the .Net Passport service is running properly.

Visse said that major outages like the Messenger delay are rare. He said that people can visit MSN's support page to get an update on the service issues and find out when it will be restored. Still, the support page was unavailable because of overwhelming traffic Monday.

"We apologize sincerely to our customers. This is not the way we want to start the New Year with our users, and we'll work day and night until we get this thing solved," Visse said.

[HamiltonJay]

Yep, .Net is a real winner in distributed computing......

[EggsAckley]

Stupid question: could this have anything to do with my not being able to access Hannity's website?

[HamiltonJay]

Think its just related to their messenger service... at least that's what the report suggests.

[Karsus]

PING :->

[zeugma]

Hmmm... they must have forgot to put their 'messenger' boxes on their daily reboot schedule.

Fortunately, this didn't affect me as MSN is the only messenging service for which I have no account.

I wouldn't trust microsoft to speak my weight, much less host communications for me.

[Bush2000]

Boy, I can't imagine what I would do without chat. Maybe use email. Or pick up a phone. /SARCASM

[PAR35]

Obviously, the software is not Y2K+3 compliant.

[jz638]

dotnet is the answer to a question nobody is asking. All the dotnet commercials end up being a pleasant little variation on 1984.

[Bush2000]

I wouldn't trust microsoft to speak my weight, much less host communications for me.

Yeah, you're not getting your money's worth. Oh, wait. It's free. /SARCASM

[Bush2000]

dotnet is the answer to a question nobody is asking. All the dotnet commercials end up being a pleasant little variation on 1984.

dotnet commercials? Reference?

[js1138]

I just got a new firewall router las Friday. I'm returning it today because it blocked hotmail and ebay. Do you suppose it knows something? ;^)

[Bush2000]

What brand, if you don't mind?

[js1138]

Netgear FR114P -- a really cool item with a true firewall, 4 port switch and print server.

[Cicero]

It happens. This isn't unique to Microsoft or .Net.

[js1138]

This noon I took home the company firewall (just purchased, not yet installed). It's D-Link DFL-300, also a pretty cool item. It was a snap to set up and didn't block any web sites.

[Michael Barnes]

The horror!! A chat service has gone down...pfft..
If anyone really needs to exercise their little fingers so bad, rather than picking up the damn phones, they can grab themselves a little client and waddle on over to port 6667...

[Bush2000]

http://www.itworld.com/App/960/IWD010403hnimknock/

[Bush2000]

Great price. And it has VPN built-in. Sweet.

[KneelBeforeZod]

shouldn't matter anyway, since a court has AOL on their way to being the only instant message provider anyway, right?

[js1138]

If only the replacement will work. It has site blocking, but it's supposed to let you choose...