Microsoft Web sites cut off from many users

Scott Hillis

SEATTLE: Several Microsoft Corp. Web sites, including the software giant's main corporate site, were cut off to many users on Wednesday, due to a glitch in the system that directs Web surfers to the sites, the company said.

Problems with almost every major Microsoft Web site surfaced on Tuesday night in the United States and Europe, and Microsoft technicians were diagnosing the problem and hoped to have the sites back up soon, company spokesman Adam Sohn said.

Asked if the problems could be the result of a hacker attack, Sohn said, "We're not ruling anything out at this point. There's not enough data at this point, but the guys are working as quick as they can to get it diagnosed, treated and cured."

As of Wednesday afternoon, the affected sites included microsoft.com, the company's main site where customers can go for product news and updates, the Expedia travel service, the Carpoint automobile shopping site, and the Homeadvisor home buying site.

The MSN.com portal that is a popular site for searches, shopping and news, the WindowsMedia entertainment guide, and the Hotmail free e-mail service were also inaccessible for some time but appeared to be normal by Wednesday afternoon.

Attack doubted

Internet security analysts were skeptical of speculation that the problem was due to hackers carrying out denial-of-service attacks in which computers are programmed to flood a Web site with so many requests for information that it blocks anyone else from seeing the site.

Such attacks shut down high-profile sites like the auction site eBay, online retailer Amazon.com, news site CNN.com and portal Yahoo.com last year.

"These do not appear to be denial-of-service attacks against their Web site," said Daniel Todd, chief technologist for public services at Keynote Systems Inc., a Web security firm that helped uncover last year's attacks.

But the length of time the problem lasted pointed to something seriously wrong in the Microsoft system, Todd said.

"If it's a simple software or hardware problem, then it shouldn't take that long to fix. It's hard to imagine this is a simple problem. If it's complicated or if it's something malicious against the servers, we can't be sure yet."

Whatever the cause, the glitch was of little concern to investors as Microsoft shares rose $2-3/8, or 3.9 per cent, to $62-15/16 on the Nasdaq. Expedia shares climbed 1/2, or 3.3 per cent, to $15-7/8.

Translators knocked out

It was one of the broadest Web site outages in weeks. Earlier this month, eBay crashed for nearly 11 hours due to system failures. In December, Amazon.com was down briefly several times during the busy holiday shopping season.

If a hacker is behind Microsoft's problems, it would be the latest embarrassing attack on the world's largest software company, which was hit in October by an intruder who made off with part of the code for products in development.

Microsoft's Sohn said the root of the problem was not with the Web sites themselves, but with the DNS, or domain name server, system that directs visitors to the sites.

The DNS system translates words like "microsoft.com" into a string of numbers, called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Using an analogy from Keynote's Todd, it acts like a phone book to give the right telephone number for a given name.

Some users could still get to the sites if they accessed the Internet through proxy servers, a kind of computer often used by large companies or Internet access providers to store popular Web content closer to end users, Sohn said.

Because Web site information is often stored for days on proxy servers, those computers might still point the way to Microsoft's online properties without help from Microsoft's system, Sohn said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.