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, at 9:30 a.m. PDT Sunday problems still plagued many customers.
After MSN Messengers 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. PDT 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 email 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 on Sunday morning.
The outage appears to be widespread, with problem reports coming from people in the United States, Australia, 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. PDT, 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 emphasised 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 Monday, criticised 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 email 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."
