Microsoft has blamed the failure of a disc controller on a database
server after one-third of worldwide users were unable to access MSN
Messenger last week.
The foul-up, which also saw a back-up server failing, has left many
users and analysts questioning Microsoft's ability to effectively
manage enterprise applications and systems under its .Net
initiative.
While Microsoft estimates the number of MSN Messenger users
worldwide to be 38 million, many analysts put the figure closer to
30 million. Microsoft would not specify why it took eight days, to
restore the service.
E-mails sent to Computerworld by irate MSN Messenger subscribers
indicated the extent to which users were inconvenienced. Joshua
Lowe, a systems administrator at AT&T in America, said he and
some of his colleagues had chosen MSN Messenger to communicate
between buildings at the company's Atlanta offices. "It's the only
free instant messaging service that works through AT&T'S
firewall, said Lowe. "Microsoft provided little, if any, timely or
useful information regarding the status of the system."
Microsoft officials said they had learned from their mistakes and
would be able to provide a reliable service in the future. "I feel
very comfortable that this type of problem will never happen
again," said MSN group product manager Bob Visse. "I would be
shocked and amazed if this ever happened again."
But the initial failure and the lengthy restoration process could
have implications for large corporations with an interest in
Microsoft's .Net initiative.
Referring to the XML-based Web services plan associated with .Net,
Michael Sampson at Ferris Research in San Francisco said, "I'm very
concerned about whether it's a good idea at all. I'm very skeptical
that they'll be able to pull it off, particularly in light of the
eight-day outage. If Microsoft themselves can't get it right and
reliable, then this goes to prove that their products are not ready
for prime-time use.
"You need to build a system of auto-redundancy and one with more
layers than Microsoft has done. Pushing Web-based applications with
.Net means that those applications will depend on the same kind of
service Microsoft couldn't restore for a week"
Mahowald added that the way Microsoft had chosen to develop and
introduce .Net may have been too ambitious when compared to IBM's
piecemeal approach to building Web services. "IBM's narrower focus
at least indicates that it's sensitive to enterprise needs, and it
has already begun to address those," he said.