Microsoft said on Monday that the seven-day glitch suffered by its MSN Messenger instant-messaging service had finally almost come to an end: "We have restored service to nearly all customers," the company beamed on its Messenger website.
But "nearly all" seems to have a rather fluid meaning in Redmond, Washington. It's the term the company has been using since Saturday, even as, according to disgruntled chatters ranting on newsgroups, nearly all who tried to log on to the service found it out to lunch.
By Monday afternoon, "nearly all" translated into roughly 90 percent, according to Bob Visse, MSN product manager. Those lucky few will find their MSN Messenger behaving as normal -- except that one in ten of their contacts will be listed as being offline.
Visse said that there was nothing special about this 10 percent: The messaging failure wasn't affecting one geographical area more than another, for instance. "To the customer, it will look random," he said.
He also declined to predict how long it will take to get the 10-percenters back online again, though he did say that the MSN team is working on the problem diligently.
But will the company be able to do it soon enough? Its service had been winning oodles of customers recently. Earlier this year, for instance, MSN announced that it actually had more "active users" than AOL's Instant Messenger.
That number is a bit of a fudge -- it didn't take into account AOL's paid subscribers -- but it did indicate that the service was gaining on its rivals very quickly. The upcoming launch of Windows XP, which will come bundled with Messenger, was expected to boost that number even more.
But while no hard numbers were available, anecdotal evidence suggests the problems had users running away from MSN instead of toward it.
"I did switch over to Yahoo Messenger," said Dan Yurman, who works for an engineering services company in Idaho Falls, Idaho. "And I think it's superior in a number of ways, because I think it ties back into a better e-mail system."
Others on microsoft.public.msn.discussion also said they were switching to other services, and some reported to Wired News that though their service had been restored, they wouldn't hesitate to change chatters if a failure repeated itself.
"I don't believe that I will have much choice but to switch if it happens again for a long-term outage," one MSN user wrote in an e-mail. "My husband is in Central America and we rely on services such as this to communicate with each other."
One user said via e-mail: "As far as the way MSN handled it? Did they handle it? No one, apparently, knew what the hell was going on. I thought it was my computer, but it was the same on all the computers at work as well. I e-mailed the problem and never got a response and no one alerted users that there was a problem, only that the system was 'unavailable.'"
MSN's Visse said that the company has learned from its mistakes. "What we did to address it was we posted up information to the Messenger area (on the Web) and on MSN, but it took about 48 hours to have that happen," he said. "So we consider this a good learning lesson for us."
But Andre Durand -- the founder of Jabber.com, a commercial company selling the open-source chatter Jabber -- has long said the portal-based IM clients (such as MSN's and AOL's) are fundamentally ill-designed. And MSN's current problems are proving his point, he said.
"Messaging should be more like e-mail," he said -- there should be thousands of chat servers all across the Internet, in private companies and in the public domain.
That way, if the chat server at a single company goes out, all the talkers in the world aren't in hot water, he said.
That's how Jabber works, and it's been getting some pretty big companies interested in its wares. It recently signed deals with Disney and France Telecom, and Durand says that many more contracts of that scale are in the works.
