Microsoft Goes Down, Then Up, Then Down

Jan. 25 -- Many of Microsoft's biggest Web sites are inaccessible again, a day after a technical goof led to major outages at MSNBC, MSN, Expedia.com and others.

Microsoft's corporate Web site was only available on 12 percent of attempts as of 3 p.m. ET, said Daniel Todd, chief technologist for public services at Keynote Systems, a company that measures the performance of Web sites.

Sources close to Microsoft confirmed ABCNEWS.com's findings that MSN and MSNBC are still having domain server problems, giving users timeout errors when they try to reach the sites.

These are the same problems that brought many of Microsoft's sites down for 24 hours from about 9:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, when a company technician made a change affecting the domain name servers, which connect numerical Internet addresses with the Web domains users type in to access them.

"All of those failures were due to domain name service problems," Todd said.

Looks Like an Attack

Computers trying to translate domains like "Microsoft.com" into Internet addresses like "132.112.110.8" periodically go to domain name servers to refresh their list of domains. Keynote's Todd said he's been unable to connect to Microsoft's servers, which means either a tremendous number of computers have been trying to hit them or some of the servers are down and the rest can't handle normal traffic.

Microsoft officials could not be reached for comment on today's problems, which started around 11:45 a.m. ET, according to Keynote.

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"Maybe they're having capacity problems, configuration problems," Todd said.

Microsoft said Wednesday the problems weren't the result of an attack. But the symptoms that are showing are the same that would come from a denial-of-service attack, the same kind of malicious hacking that brought down major Web sites in February 2000.

A Black Eye for a Software Giant

Microsoft said the problem was not caused by a hacker, but observers are already calling the incident a black eye for the company.