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MSN Messenger goes dark (or 1 Degree of seperation, .Net leaves 75 Million without service)
CNET ^ | Stefanie Olsen

Posted on 01/06/2003 12:58:14 PM PST by 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.


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: microsoftnet
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To: KneelBeforeZod
shouldn't matter anyway, since a court has AOL on their way to being the only instant message provider anyway, right?

And what court would that be?
21 posted on 01/06/2003 2:04:55 PM PST by Bush2000
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To: Bush2000
typo, not a court, but a patent...
22 posted on 01/06/2003 2:25:33 PM PST by KneelBeforeZod
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To: KneelBeforeZod
Unlikely. If AOL tries to enforce that patent, they're going to get their heads handed to them. There's plenty of prior art. IRC, for one thing. Novell had an application more than a decade ago which allowed you to see which users were online. And Gawd knows how many mainframe time-sharing and Unix systems allow you to see who's online.
23 posted on 01/06/2003 2:32:05 PM PST by Bush2000
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To: KneelBeforeZod
That's yet another brin-dead patent brought to you courtesy of the idiots running Fedgov. According to my manpage for 'talk', "The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD." That would put it sometime around 1982 or so.
24 posted on 01/06/2003 4:01:37 PM PST by zeugma
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To: HamiltonJay
Probably the cleaning lady unplugged the server.
25 posted on 01/06/2003 5:14:06 PM PST by Flashman_at_the_charge
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To: Bush2000
Back to my firewall. I am suspicious that theonly sites I noticed being blocked were eBay, hotmail, and Windows Update. This smells a bit like I got a product intended for export to some country that would like these sites blocked. I don't know about eBay, but Windows Update offeres 128 bit encryption modules.
26 posted on 01/06/2003 6:14:48 PM PST by js1138
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To: js1138
Maybe you just needed a firmware update. Did you try?
27 posted on 01/06/2003 7:00:40 PM PST by Bush2000
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To: Bush2000
Yup. I went through several levels of support. The thing isn't that complicated. It's supposed to work right out of the box, pretty much.
28 posted on 01/06/2003 7:06:38 PM PST by js1138
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To: HamiltonJay
I still can't log in.
29 posted on 01/07/2003 12:52:59 PM PST by Frapster
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To: Frapster; Focault's Pendulum
We have experts on that subject around here!
30 posted on 01/07/2003 12:55:46 PM PST by Redcloak (Bad Redcloak. No biscuit.)
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To: Redcloak
It says (Bad Redcloak, no biscuit) beside your name. Why is that?
31 posted on 01/07/2003 1:10:22 PM PST by Frapster
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To: Frapster
Cuz I'm teasing the hapless Focault's Pendulum.
32 posted on 01/07/2003 2:00:17 PM PST by Redcloak (Am I logged in?)
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To: mykdsmom
*
33 posted on 01/07/2003 2:05:51 PM PST by Constitution Day
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To: Redcloak
Cuz I'm teasing the hapless Focault's Pendulum.

Hapless indeed!

Report Self Abuse

34 posted on 01/07/2003 3:33:25 PM PST by Focault's Pendulum
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