Update: It appears that the .NET Service is still down. The status page has yet to be updated. Users around the world have been affected by this outage.
Users that are trying to figure out what's wrong with their hosts file, be assured there's nothing wrong with it. This is a problem on Microsoft's end, not your computer.
We'll update you with more information as soon as we can! While you're waiting for your Messenger to come online, visit our Community Forums.
Update 2: The problem seems to have been solved and you should now be able to use Messenger again without any issues. Here is a Microsoft statement with regards to the outages:
Yesterday (September 10) and earlier today (September 11), we experienced two outages affecting a small portion of Windows Live Messenger customers. Caused by hardware problems, both outages were quickly addressed and have been fixed. The stability of the service is one of our top priorities at Microsoft and we are committed to providing our customers with the best service possible. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and disruption any outage may have caused.
The post listed details on the first news of Windows Live Messenger 9, back in January 2007! As a result my web host, Dreamhost was forced to take down Messenger Stuff until the content was removed. I was outraged (not at Dreamhost, they were just following the law), but at Microsoft for issuing this DMCA notice for talking about upcoming software. It later turns out the news post was not the issue, but comments within them, revealing links to the beta.
I must stress I cannot control what people post in comments, this is the Internet! I do get a lot of spam comments and I do go through them as delete as much of them as possible, including those of copyright material of leaked betas (I really do). What annoys me the most is Microsoft simply went straight to the DMCA notice instead of contacting me politely on the issue of which I would have complied in the fullest way. My email address is in my WHOIS information of which they would have had to access in order to contact Dreamhost!
The lack of working with me on the issue is what hurts. I always thought msgstuff.com had a good relationship with Microsoft and the fact they can't ask my nicely to remove content, which I find impossible to control is mind boggling. To put this simply Microsoft went step to step 3 instead of step 1. My opinion is that they are abusing their power and hurting their relationship with those who talk about their products and that's a huge mistake for any company.
Back in 2003 Microsoft did this to Neowin, over a feedback post listing links to XP Peer-to-Peer Software Development Kit (SDK).
I only hope that this does not happen again as I simply can't control what you want to say. Now I know this post is very rant like and bitter, but I am 'ticked-off' to say the least over the issue especially as this could of been a much simpler matter.
To top it all, if you visit the deleted post, Google ads still provide you with links to the beta (I guess that's my fault too).
So what do you my readers think of this problem? Were Microsoft in the right to take down my website and am I just overreacting to the whole issue?
P.S. Don't post any links to leaked betas in this or any other post.
on Tue 26 Feb 2008 (17:52 GMT) (2444 views)
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:
We are aware that some customers may be experiencing difficulty accessing their Windows Live accounts [...] We're actively investigating the cause and are working to take the appropriate steps to remedy the situation as rapidly as possible.
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.
On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our user’s computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update.
The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.
Normally Skype's peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.
The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users' security was not, at any point, at risk.
This disruption was unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope. We would like to point out that very few technologies or communications networks today are guaranteed to operate without interruptions.
We are very proud that over the four years of its operation, Skype has provided a technically resilient communications tool to millions of people worldwide. Skype has now identified and already introduced a number of improvements to its software to ensure that our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring.
The Skype community of users has been incredibly supportive and we are very grateful for all their good wishes.
There are claims that the team are blaming Microsoft patch day for the downtime, but I see no evidence of this.
View the post at the official Skype blog
It all started on the 16th August when logging into Skype was giving users difficulties. Joosep from the official Skype blog said:
Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.
The team have been working around the clock fixing the issue, which they say will be explained in detail on Monday. In two days nine blog posts were made by the team about the issue, you can hardly say they were slacking and well done to them for working so hard.
Two days of problems with Skype will not go down with customers, many of whom use Skype as an essential part of their business. The downtime does not appear to be a result of an attack or a problem with the data centre, but a software issue. Let's wait and see what the team have to say about the issue on Monday.
View the list of downtime posts in the development blog's August archives Source: TechCrunchThe main site and forums were down for about 7 hours today (from about 1PM BST) which we believe was due to an error with our host's DNS configuration. Everything appears to be back to normal now (thanks to the great DreamHost support service) so we can continue to bring you the latest Messenger news and views.
Hope you missed us
There however is no warning about this on the official service status page at the time of post, hopefully this should be resolved soon, all we can do is wait.
Update: Most people now seem to be able to sign in again (including myself).
All we can do is wait-it out and hopefully things will return to normal soon. We'll notify you when they do.
We'll leave you with a particularly funny but true quote from BlackDigital on Bink.nu:
[...] the WLM Status page says 'All systems are stable and running'. Maybe Microsoft will one day get around to acknowledging faults with their service instead of leaving users in the dark.
Update: It seems the service is returning to normal. I would suggest signing out and back in again if you are still receiving the error. Apparently engineers investigated the problem and found a fix.
Among all the posts for help in the newsgroups, Jimmymac posted (6th post down) explaining he fixed it by deleting messenger's registry settings. Jonathan Kay created a .reg file that will automatically delete the settings for you, remove_msgrsettings.reg.
Before running the .reg file, completely exit Windows Live Messenger by right clicking the buddy icon near the clock and clicking Exit. Once you have run the file and clicked Yes, try signing in again.
You will loose quite a few of your Messenger settings, but then again it is necessary if you cannot sign in. The file may also help if you want a clean up of Messenger.
Korea's top Internet service provider, KT is disputing with Microsoft when users could not connect to the MSN Messenger servers for several hours on Thursday morning. The rest of Korea were not effected by the downtime leaving KT in uproar when they discovered they were the only company effected.
Microsoft blamed KT's pipeline leading to their data center saying that it was the cause of the trouble. However KT spokesman Hwang Dae-woon claimed Microsoft were at blame because two ports were out in the United States. KT, who account for half of the 12.6 million broadband users in Korea, blamed Microsoft for the problem when they found that only their users were unable to log into Messenger.
Microsoft were also accused for not notifying the company of the problem immediately and working on a quick solution. A KT spokesman pointed out how millions lost connections with friends and how businessmen were cut out of conversations possibly losing important contracts.
Source: The Korea Times
Messenger Stuff
