Microsoft's websites were offline for up to 23 hours -- the most dramatic snafu to date on the Internet -- because of an equipment misconfiguration, the company says.
Technical experts blame Microsoft's design decisions for exacerbating its woes. All the affected Microsoft sites rely on just four Windows servers, located in the company's Canyon Park data center, to forward users to the right destination via the Domain Name System (DNS).
The focus of their concern is that Microsoft may have placed key domain name servers on a single network, making them vulnerable to a directed attack. If these servers are disabled, a surfer's browser cannot locate a specific Web site."Someone should really be embarrassed," said Paul Robertson, director of vulnerability assessment at security service provider TruSecure, who examined Microsoft's network configuration using security tools.
"What pisses me off...is that Microsoft does not seem to be able to get their crap together," Parrish wrote in a scathing e-mail. "If it's not their crappy software, that cost me God knows what to support, it's their network problems. They don't get blamed for this, we do! I personally am really getting tired of it."
But sources close to the company insist that Microsoft had indeed been the victim of a denial of service attack on Thursday.It also appears that Microsoft has now handed over the management of its DNS routing systems to Akamai, and may be running Linux on at least one of its servers.
"During the morning of Jan. 25, Microsoft was the target of a denial-of-service attack against the routers that direct traffic to the company's Web sites," Microsoft said in a statement late Thursday afternoon. "As a result, access to some of the Microsoft Internet properties, including Microsoft.com and MSN.com, was intermittent for many customers throughout this morning."The company emphasized that Thursday's attack, which began in the morning and extended into the afternoon, was not related to the technical glitch that crippled its sites late Tuesday and most of Wednesday.
A practical joke misled many amateur investigators this week into prematurely believing that Microsoft's massive Web outage was the result of an attack.A search for "Microsoft.com" using any of several of the Whois servers, which list information on each domain name on the Internet, returned 23 other domain names as well, such as: MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD.COM and MICROSOFT.COM.IS.SECRETLY.RUN.BY.ILLUMINATI.TERRORISTS.NET.
Many people thought this indicated a hack. In reality, the bogus domain names are the result of online vandals who take advantage of the way many Whois servers work.
Microsoft's practice of staying silent until -- and if -- it's ready to speak angered many who felt that they'd been left to pick up the pieces this week after the software giant took a tumble.
Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, said this week's setbacks effectively destroyed its still-fresh campaign and any Web dynasty hopes."It's destroyed," Enderle said. "While they're running a big campaign talking about the reliability of MS products is not the time to have major outages at the site, particularly for sites as visible as Microsoft. (The outages) pretty much destroyed their advertising campaign, and any value they might have achieved from that campaign is pretty much gone.
"In fact, there's even a risk that the campaign will become an industry joke," Enderle said.
