Microsoft Web sites suffer large
scale blackout
by Joris Evers, IDG News Service\Amsterdam Bureau
January 24, 2001, 07:45
AMSTERDAM (01/24/2001) - Microsoft Corp. confirmed Wednesday
that most of its online properties became unreachable Wednesday
morning due to a problem in the system that maps Web addresses to
IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.
Sites hit include Web-based e-mail service Hotmail.com, Web portal
MSN.com, news Web site MSNBC.com and the company's corporate
site Microsoft.com.
"The Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) does not return the
correct response when it is queried for a Microsoft Web site," said
Ruud de Jonge, support manager at Microsoft Benelux.
The first reports of the problem started coming in "very early"
Wednesday morning, said De Jonge. It is unclear when the sites will
be available again. "It will take some time, this can't be restored by
hitting one switch," he said.
Microsoft has yet to pin down the cause of the DNS error. "It can be
a system or human error, but somebody could also have done this
intentionally," De Jonge said. "We don't manage the DNS ourselves, it
is a system controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN) with worldwide replicas."
A team at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington is
working on the problem, which has been given top priority, said De
Jonge.
Because of the blackout, some 60 million Hotmail users worldwide
can't access their e-mail, Microsoft customers can't download
software updates or get online support and MSNBC.com has no
audience. Other services that can't be reached include
Windowsupdate.com, which contains updates for the Windows
operating system, Passport.com, Microsoft's online identification
service, and bCentral.com, a portal for small and medium sized
businesses.
Hackers could be responsible for the outage that has continued for
hours now, said Simon Hania, spokesman for Dutch Internet service
provider XS4ALL Internet BV. "The name server that is authoritative
for Microsoft's Web sites might have crippled under a Denial of
Service attack," he said.
Hania said, however, it is more likely that a network error or system
failure caused the problem.
The DNS consists of many machines around the world set up in a
hierarchy. "It looks like the machine hit is in the top of the DNS tree,"
Hania said. "Once it is fixed it can take a couple of hours for all DNS
systems around the world to pick up the correct DNS information."
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