Windows Live Services Hit by Global Outage

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Microsoft’s cloud-based Windows Live offerings were cut off from users worldwide for several hours on Thursday evening due to a domain name service (DNS) issue.

The software giant has 360 million Windows Live Hotmail users globally as well as 299 million active Windows Live Messenger accounts.

Though Microsoft thought it had restored service for all Hotmail, Office365 and SkyDrive accounts by 9:45 PM PT Thursday, some customers continued to report problems. At 11:02 PM, the software giant said it was working on propagating the requisite DNS configuration changes for fixing the problem, but that it would take some time to restore service to everyone.

Microsoft notified Windows Live users at 11:49 PM that it had completed propagating its DNS configuration changes around the world, and had restored service for most customers.

“Depending on your location you may still experience issues over the next 30 minutes as the [DNS] changes make their way through the network,” explained Microsoft blogger Chris Jones. “Thank you for your patience as we have worked to address these issues.”

Lost In Translation

DNS translates Internet domain names meaningful to human beings into the numerical identifiers required by networking equipment to locate and address computing devices worldwide. Moreover, the system makes it possible for domain names to be assigned to groups of Internet resources and users in ways that are independent of each entity’s physical location.

DNS is often compared to a telephone book because it likewise cross references individual names with their numerical equivalents. For example, the domain name cnn.com has an equivalent IP address of 157.166.224.25.

As Thursday’s Windows Live outage indicated, however, DNS issues can have unintended consequences for users of services that are based in the cloud. What’s more, fixing an unexpected DNS problem takes time. On Friday morning, Microsoft was still working to resolve the continuing…

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Tags: Global, live, Outage, Services, Windows

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2011 at 3:19 am and is filed under More Science/Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.