IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Messenger service went down yesterday, leaving most of the instant messaging software's 75 million worldwide users without access to the service for more than five hours.
According to a Microsoft spokesman, the service went down at approximately 9 a.m. EST, 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, 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 the MSN Messenger clients. The problems occurred somewhere in the .Net Messenger Service, Grothaus said.
MSN Hotmail e-mail service and other MSN services weren't affected, he said.
Although service was restored for some users by about 2 p.m. EST, some users were still unable to log onto the messaging software later in the afternoon. Microsoft didn't have any more difficulties with the service late yesterday, but some users may still be shut out as the service scales back up, according to Grothaus.
"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 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 online.
Last week, Microsoft's Passport service suffered an outage.
Free Insider GuideCopyright © 1994 - 2012 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Computerworld Inc. is prohibited. Computerworld and Computerworld.com and the respective logos are trademarks of International Data Group Inc.
