The Messenger servers appear to be having some issues at the moment, effecting several countries and millions of users. The problem seems to effect Windows Live ID itself as many services using it appear to be having problems. There has not yet been a statement on the outage, but with so many Windows Live services having issues this needs to be resolved ASAP. We will keep you updated.

Hopefully this is nothing like the YouTube issue earlier this week.

Update: The services affected (Windows Live Messenger, ID, Mail) all appear to be coming back to full strength now. If you're still having problems be patient!

According to LiveSide, Microsoft issued a statement saying:
As usual, the official Microsoft status pages reported everything as being fine. The Windows Live support page said there were "no issues" and the good old MSN Messenger status page (which in all the years I've been using Messenger seems to have been a static page and never changed) said that all systems were "stable and running". Although these problems were fixed fairly quickly it would have been nice to see Microsoft keeping their users updated (for once), or even their systems being stable enough to be able to cope with issues like this and have decent backup measures in place.