Microsoft Resolves Live Outage

Microsoft sent me an e-mail statement in response to my earlier post on the outage, which appeared to be widespread—it was.

"Microsoft customers experienced issues accessing various services that rely on Windows Live ID for authentication including Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Xbox Live," according to the statement.

The number of stated services is probably an understatement. I would guess that the outage affected all services using Windows Live ID. I couldn't access Office Live, which uses the authentication mechanism but isn't on the list of affected services.

Microsoft acknowledged that the outage affected "some consumers worldwide," but gave no indication of how many. Interpretation: Microsoft usually diminishes any problem like this by saying that only a small number of customers were affected. Since Microsoft's statement doesn't take that line of defense and "worldwide" is stated, I presume that the outage was widespread.

No duration is given in the statement, but there is a start time. "We began receiving reports of issues at approximately 3:15 am PST and immediately began taking action to address it," the statement said.

By my math, Live services were troubled or inaccessible for at least six hours. At 12:30 p.m. EST, services were down. I checked again around 1:50 p.m. EST and found all services accessible, but that doesn't mean they were available to everyone. I received Microsoft's statement of full restoration—"normal operations have been restored to all customers"—around 6 p.m. EST.