Microsoft back online - sort of

Microsoft.com is back online now after yesterday's prolonged outage, and has blamed the problems on human error.

Microsoft.co.uk, however, is still unavailable. A statement posted on the dot-com site blames an engineer for making changes to an internal router which stopped communication between internal and external domain name servers. It says: "At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday (PST), a Microsoft technician made a configuration change to the routers on the edge of Microsoft's Domain Name Server (DNS) network. The DNS servers are used to connect domain names with numeric IP addresses (eg. 207.46.230.219) of the various servers and networks that make up Microsoft's web presence. "The mistaken configuration change limited communication between DNS servers on the internet and Microsoft's DNS servers. This limited communication caused many of Microsoft's sites to be unreachable (although they were actually still operational) to a large number of customers." The company insisted no software was to blame and that its network remained secure. The UK site currently just has an apology statement. It reads: " Microsoft is currently experiencing issues with its web sites: microsoft.com, msn.com, msnbc.com, windowsmedia.com, encarta.com and carpoint.com. Users may experience delays in being able to connect to these sites. Microsoft is working to resolve these issues speedily and you should try again later." A spokeswoman for Microsoft insisted that microsoft.co.uk was available for the vast majority of users.