Sunday October 24, 2004:

After an hour or two of connect failures with MSN email, a call to MSN Tech support elicited the info that MSN and Hotmail email servers are down, apparently over a large area. Resumption of service is not expected until sometime tomorrow (Monday) afternoon.

If you aren't getting through, it's most likely their problem - not something on your own machine.

No reason for the outage given by MSN, but a DoS or Virus attack would be the logical suspect - unless someone's heard of a hurricane or earthquake my local news hasn't reported.

Voice phone lines are also affected (possibly by all the people trying to call to see what's wrong.) It took me 11 tries to "make" a connection on voice phone. The symptom I found on the email is an error message saying "the server disconnected disconnected unexpectedly," - "probably due to a time-out" - although it "times out" in under 3 seconds. The first 10 calls on voice were similar - as soon as they said "please hold" the line disconnected.

It was not indicated whether it's "global" or just the server for my area, but "my area" is a pretty wide one.

John