Microsoft Goes Down, Then Up, Then Down

Jan. 25, 2001 -- 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.

"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.

"It doesn't speak well for their operations capability," said Carl Howe, a lead technology analyst for Forrester Research.

"If you had a car that broke down for 24 hours and left you stranded in a place that you didn't want to be, even though it only happened once, would you buy another car like that on your next purchase?" he said.

Outages like this may lead customers to consider alternatives like the Linux or Apple Macintosh operating systems, he said.

Howe suggested that Microsoft move fast to take responsibility for today's problems and conduct a program to reassure customers they're a reliable operator.

"The hardest part of crisis response is standing up and saying, 'Yes, we have a problem,'" he said.

Taking a Hit

Microsoft's Web sites are third on the Media Metrix list of the Top 50 Web properties, logging in 53.8 million unique visitors in December. Observers in The Industry Standard speculated the company would lose significant ad revenue as a result of the outage.

"It definitely hurts, especially when you consider so many competitors that deliver arguably the same product they do," Jupiter Communications analyst Patrick Keane was quoted as saying.

The company just launched a $150 million advertising campaign to make its MSN service more competitive with AOL, and had been adding users in recent months. It now has about 4 million subscribers, far below AOL's 27 million.

Poor Design Blamed

Howe said the Microsoft domain name servers were all on one network, which gives them little flexibility if that network gets cut off or damaged.

Other online giants have backup servers located in different places to prevent a problem with one from affecting the others.

"Given that a company of Microsoft's size and financial resources has locations all over the place, they might have just as easily positioned one or two in Redmond [Wash.] and another in New York and London," Ric Steinberger, technical director of Security Portal and an engineering instructor at the University of California at Berkeley's extension program, told the Standard.

Microsoft.com, MSN.com, MSNBC.com, expedia.com, Carpoint.com, and MoneyCentral.com were all affected by the outage.

Attrition.org, which tracks hacker activity, says Microsoft's New Zealand Web site was defaced early Tuesday by a group called Prime Suspectz, which regularly attacks the Web sites of large multinational corporations.