Microsoft confirms Web site blackout

Reg readers diagnose fault

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 24th January 2001 11:47 GMT

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Updated Microsoft has confirmed that its corporate Web sites have become unavailable due to an as yet unidentified technical problem.

Since the early hours of this morning www.microsoft.com, msn.com, hotmail.com and msnbc.com have all been unavailable. A company spokeswoman said the company was working hard to resolve the issue and that, as yet, there was no time available when a fix will be in place.

Over the weekend problem with DNS servers made Microsoft's site unavailable for some users, but the current 'outage' has not been linked to this by the software giant.

Register readers have contacted us to suggest that the software giant's domain name servers are out of commission. Its four domain name servers are all running, but none are able to locate where www.microsoft.com is.

Another reader pointed that, according to the whois database, both microsoft.com and msn.net rely on the name servers at xxx.msft.net

He said that Microsoft has all it's nameservers in one subnet, and now that subnet is either down or unreachable.

The webserver itself is NOT down, it's still accessible either here or here ®

DNS trouble made Microsoft, Yahoo! unavailable

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