Microsoft's MSN Messenger service went down yesterday (6 January)
leaving most of the instant messaging software's 75 million
worldwide users without access to the service for more than five
hours.
A Microsoft spokesman said the service went down at about 2pm GMT
and the root cause of the outage is still unknown.
The outage affected all of Microsoft's .net Messenger Service users
worldwide, including Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger
subscribers, said Larry Grothaus, lead product manager for MSN.
.net Messenger Service is the back-end service that powers both the
Windows Messenger and the MSN Messenger clients. The problems
occurred somewhere in the .net Messenger Service, Grothaus said.
MSN Hotmail e-mail service and other MSN services were
unaffected.
Service was restored for some users five hours later, but a number
of users were still unable to log on to the messaging
software.
"It looks from what I've seen that [the service] is scaling back
up. Some users may be having a little trouble getting on, but it
just because it is just an issue of scaling the service back up and
getting everybody back on the authentication servers," Grothaus
said.