http://news.com.com/2100-1023-269529.html
update The MSN Messenger outage spilled over into a seventh day
Monday, with many users of the free service complaining of
inaccessible accounts, despite Microsoft's claims that most had
been restored.
MSN Messenger users started experiencing trouble Tuesday, with the
most commonly reported glitches being connection problems and
missing buddy lists of friends. Microsoft temporarily took MSN
Messenger offline around 3 p.m. PDT Thursday in an attempt to fix
the problem. Although the company had partially restored the
service in many countries by Friday morning, problems still plagued
many customers Monday.
After MSN Messenger users complained about poor communication,
Microsoft on Friday--the fourth day of the outage--started posting
routine service updates on the messenger support page. In a
statement released around 4:30 p.m. Saturday, MSN Vice President
Richard Bray acknowledged Microsoft had failed to make good on its
promise "to restore all service to MSN Messenger customers by end
of day Friday, July 6. At this point, we are pleased that we have
been successful in restoring service to nearly all of our
customers."
But frustrated MSN Messenger customers continued to send e-mail to
CNET News.com about the same rate as Saturday, with most
complaining of having no access to their instant messaging
accounts. The first reports of restored service, including
recovered buddy lists, started trickling in Sunday morning.
The outage appears to be widespread, with problem reports coming
from people in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile,
the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Austria,
Egypt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and at least a half-dozen
other countries.
As the outage continues, analysts and Microsoft customers are also
questioning the viability of the company's new Web services
initiatives that rely on instant messaging, such as Microsoft.Net
and HailStorm.
Microsoft had been fairly tight-lipped about the problem until
Friday around 11:30 a.m., when Bray issued a lengthy statement. He
acknowledged that service interruptions had been ongoing for
several days. He also admitted that "for a brief period of time
yesterday, it was necessary for us to reboot and restore all of our
MSN Messenger servers as part of our efforts to restore service to
all customers."
Bray emphasized that the "issue which caused this service
interruption has been identified." He described it as "an extremely
rare set of circumstances that occurred when one of our database
servers had a disk controller fail. The backup for this controller
also had an error occur which resulted in a more lengthy path to
full service recovery."
Microsoft estimated that about two-thirds of MSN Messenger
customers currently have full access to the service but
acknowledged that some people would continue to experience
connection problems and lost buddy lists until the service is fully
restored.
"We are in the process of restoring the backup data for the
remaining customers who are still experiencing the service outage,"
Bray said.
Say something, please
MSN Messenger users on Friday expressed their frustration that
Microsoft had not been forthcoming sooner. Erick Houli, an MSN
Messenger user from Caracas, Venezuela, said he had access to one
of two accounts and that his "buddy list seems to be intact."
Houli, who started having service trouble last Monday, criticized
Microsoft's customer-service operation.
"Microsoft has not published any information on the Net about this
service outage, not even on their MSN site," he said Friday
morning, hours before Microsoft issued a statement on the service
outage's fourth day. "And there is no e-mail where you can ask
what's going on or even complain about the service."
Philippe Caillet, a 20-year user of Microsoft products in Paris,
slammed the company for its communication skills.
"What is more outrageous is the lack of information on MSN.com," he
said. "If they can't handle such crisis communication for a simple
matter--everyone has experienced down servers once in their
life--what will happen when Microsoft will integrate instant
messaging in the core of Windows XP?"
Similar sentiments came from the other side of the English Channel.
"All everybody is asking is that Microsoft posts a notice on the
Web or the MSN server to say that the server is down," Mike John, a
user of the messaging service in the United Kingdom, said Friday
morning. "This is only common courtesy and respect."
No business as usual
For companies that already rely on MSN Messenger for business, the
length of the outage has dealt them a heavy blow.
Jean-Luc Praz, a freelance Web designer from Chile, said, "MSN
Messenger is an important part of my business, with customers
located very far from my office." The outage affected an online
meeting with a customer "in his office 12,000 kilometers away from
me," he said. "I find it pretty amazing that a company like
Microsoft with an army of software engineers is not able to fix a
problem in a service three days after it appeared."
Zurek emphasized that consumers have instant messaging alternatives
such as AOL Time Warner or Yahoo. "If Microsoft can't ensure
reliability--meaning the system is consistently failing--consumers
will go somewhere else."
Praz decided to use Yahoo as a backup service this week. "I had to
use contingency procedures using Yahoo Messenger and ICQ to face
this situation." But the time lost switching customers over to
alternative services cost him. "I just can't stress enough the need
for all people around to have a backup procedure in case things go
belly-up like today," he added.
Wes Thierry, who in San Leandro, Calif., works for a division of
Salt Lake City-based Evans and Sutherland, said the outage has
caused hardship.
"We decided on using the messenger about three months ago," he
said. "Our group consists of about 30 people, most of which are
software engineers, and messaging allows us the ability to quickly
ask simple questions without necessarily having to distract people
with phone calls all of the time." Six workers in the San Francisco
Bay Area also rely on MSN Messenger to get "that real office
feeling," he added.
Zurek believes that no matter how great the customer frustration,
MSN Messenger should be fully operational soon. "Microsoft has
smart people. I'm optimistic they'll get this solved," he
said.
Still, the MSN Messenger outage leaves questions unanswered. Many
people reported a string of secondary problems, such as the
inability to access Hotmail accounts, lost MSN Calendar data, or
the inability to download software from the Microsoft Developer
Network Web site. All share one common thread: Passport
authentication.
Andrzej Bania, who works for an Internet media design company in
London, said Microsoft's lack of communication about the service
interruption is frustrating.
"The problem is that the lack of feedback means that we do not know
if they have been hacked, suffered serious hardware failure, (or)
are upgrading in preparation for integrating messaging services for
Xbox, etc."
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this is crap 
