Microsoft technicians made erroneous configuration changes to routers on Microsoft's network, causing outages on many popular travel and reference sites on the network, the company admitted after correcting the problem.
Technically, while the sites were up and running, the computers known as Domain Name Servers, or DNS, that route users to the sites were malfunctioning, essentially rendering the sites invisible to thousands of Web surfers.
"The mistaken configuration change limited communication between DNS servers on the Internet and Microsoft's DNS servers," Microsoft said in a statement Wednesday apologizing for the inconvenience caused after Tuesday's changes which affected customers for two days.
"This limited communication caused many of Microsoft's sites to be unreachable (although they were actually still operational) to a large number of customers ... This was an operational error and not the result of any issue with Microsoft or third-party products nor the security of our networks."
Microsoft said that after it removed the changes to the router configuration at 5:00 p.m. (0100 GMT Thursday) it "immediately saw a massive improvement in the DNS network."
A spokesman said the company had been left "mystified" by the outages.
The trouble was spotted Tuesday afternoon, when users could not gain access to Expedia, Encarta, MSN.com and other Microsoft Web sites.
A separate DNS error over the weekend -- an error attributed to another company that administers Internet addresses -- shut down both Microsoft's sites and Yahoo.com -- SAN FRANCISCO (AFP)
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