Technician error is to blame for crippling Microsoft’s Internet connection that effectively blocked access to its major Web sites for almost 24 hours the company admitted late Wednesday.
As reported by MacCentral Wednesday afternoon, Microsoft’s problems began around 9:30 PM EST Tuesday night and effectively blocked access to sites such as Microsoft.com, Encarta.com, Carpoint.com, MSN.com, WindowsMedia.com, and Expedia.com. MacCentral readers report access to Hotmail.com was also affected, but on a much smaller scale.
In a press statement, Microsoft explained that a “router configuration error” caused requests for access to Microsoft Web sites to not be replied to. The specific problem was identified around 8 PM EST Wednesday and service was returned shortly thereafter.
Before the exact problem was found, Microsoft was not sure if the problem was due to network intrusion by hackers. It was later determined that was not the case. The outage came just a few months after a hacker broke into the company’s corporate network.
The timing of the outage comes at a bad time for Microsoft as it launched a major national prime-time television ad campaign for its server software just this past Monday, entitled “software for the agile business.”