MSN Messenger Suffers Outage

A recent outage on Microsoft’s MSN Messenger instant messaging (IM) service caused some customers to be without service for seven days and forced approximately 300,000 users to rebuild their contact lists. The highly publicized outage could hamper adoption of the forthcoming IM service based around the Windows Messenger client in Windows XP, and could cause businesses to think twice about allowing Microsoft to host crucial business services, such as authentication and notification, as part of the planned HailStorm initiative.

What Happened and Why

Beginning on July 3, about 10 million MSN Messenger users (one-third of the total) found that they were unable to access their contact lists. For a brief period on July 5, when Microsoft rebooted all the MSN Messenger servers, no customers could log on to the service.

Microsoft allowed a significant amount of time to elapse before officially acknowledging the problem on July 5 and providing a brief explanation on July 6. According to the company, the outage occurred when a hard disk controller on a database server failed, and an error in the primary backup system forced the company to move to a slower secondary backup system, resulting in the long delay before service was fully restored. Although some of the MSN Messenger servers use Windows 2000, the company says the outage was caused exclusively by hardware-related problems.