Microsoft restored online service Monday for a handful of games bundled with recent versions of the Windows operating system, after nearly a week of outages.
A Microsoft representative confirmed that the games were inaccessible for much of the last six days due to intermittent problems with the Microsoft servers hosting the games. The faulty hardware was replaced Monday, and all games appeared to be functioning normally. The affected games--backgammon, checkers, spades, hearts and reversi--are all free for Windows users. Microsoft provides the client software to run the games in recent versions of its Windows operating system, including the current Windows XP, and runs the online services for them through Zone.com, the online gaming section of its MSN Internet service.