MSN Messenger Outage Affects Millions

Microsoft's MSN Messenger service went down Monday, leaving most of the instant-messaging software's 75 million worldwide users without access to the service for more than 5 hours.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson, the service went down at approximately 6 a.m. Pacific Time, and the root cause of the outage is still unknown.

Slow Recovery

The outage affected all of Microsoft's .Net Messenger Service users worldwide, including Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger subscribers, according to a statement from Larry Grothaus, lead product manager for MSN. The .Net Messenger Service is the back-end service that powers both the Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger clients.

The problems occurred somewhere in the .Net Messenger Service, Grothaus said. MSN Hotmail e-mail service and other MSN services were not affected, he added.

Though service was restored for some users by about 11 a.m. PST, a number of users were still unable to log on to the messaging software into the afternoon. Microsoft is not seeing any more difficulties with the service right now, but some users may still be shut out as the service returns, according to Grothaus.

Other Troubles

"It looks [like], from what I've seen, [the service] is scaling back up. Some users may be having a little trouble getting on, but it is just an issue of scaling the service back up and getting everybody back on the authentication servers," Grothaus said.

Customers can obtain .Net Messenger Service status information from Microsoft's site.

Last week, Microsoft's Passport service suffered an outage. Passport is the online authentication service that enables users to enjoy a single sign-on for participating services. Microsoft promotes it as especially helpful for electronic commerce, since online shoppers can avoid having to reenter their purchasing information for digital merchants that support Passport.

America Online's competing AOL Instant Messenger service has also suffered its share of outages. However, users of that IM service reported several service disruptions in mid- and late 2001 but no such widespread problems in 2002.