MSN Messenger, Passport Experience Second Outage
For the second time in nearly a week, MSN experienced major network outages that left scores of users in the dark. From roughly 12:30 PM to 3:45 PM EST, Microsoft's MSN Messenger and Passport authentication service were unavailable to some customers due to what a spokesperson described as an "internal issue."
Microsoft claims that the service interruption was not due to a denial of service attack or other malicious activities.
Microsoft Passport is the gateway to an array of services offered by MSN including Hotmail, MSN Messenger, MSN Mobile, MSN Calendar, MSN Groups, MSN Money, MSN Entertainment, and many more affiliated sites. Aside from MSN, the Windows Rights Management service uses Passport as a unique identifier to secure documents.
Windows Rights Management technology is primarily intended for use within a corporate firewall and is powered by Windows 2003 Server's Windows Rights Management Service (RMS) layer, using Active Directory for authentication rather than Passport. Microsoft has noted that customers should not the Passport-hosted rights management service for long term document protection.
A trial of the Passport-hosted service is available to customers through an add-on to Internet Explorer and is integrated into in Office 2003.
When Passport was unavailable to authenticate user names, some customers were unable to access rights protected content such as e-mails and Microsoft Word documents.
In a prepared statement released to BetaNews, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "This morning we identified an issue which began causing a portion of our customers to experience logon and connectivity issues to some MSN services. We have begun to restore full service to our customers and are working quickly to take the necessary actions to restore for all customers as soon as possible."
"Customers may continue to experience sporadic issues in the near term, but we anticipate having service fully restored to all customers very soon. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or disruption this may cause our customers," the spokesperson said.