A number of MSN services were down for the second time in less than a week, and again, the company isn"t identifying the cause.
On Thursday, less than a week after a major MSN services outage, many MSN users found themselves unable to access Passport and MSN Messenger. Microsoft acknowledged the problem. "This morning we identified an issue which began causing a portion of our customers to experience logon and connectivity issues to some MSN services," said an MSN spokeswoman in a statement. As of 3:00 p.m. EST, she noted that "we have begun to restore full service to some customers already, and are working quickly to take the necessary actions to restore for all customers as soon as possible."
MSN officials said MSN services began working again after a more-than-three-hour outage. The services were unavailable to some users between 12:30 p.m. EST and about 3:45 p.m. EST. "Customers may continue to experience sporadic issues in the near term, but we anticipate having service fully restored to all customers very soon," the spokeswoman added. Microsoft said that Thursday"s outage was not related to last week"s wide-scale MSN outage. The latest outage also does not seem to be related to "any external causes including a denial of service attack or other malicious activities," the spokeswoman said.