I use MSN to chat every night, and usually there are no problems. I generally chat for four or five hous per night, and I often forget that I’m actually relying on another company for my chatting pleasure. I mean, what would happen if for some reason MSN suddenly was not working? What if they had a network outage and suddenly I couldn’t chat with my friends and family (many of whom live overseas?). Well actually, that happens sometimes…
Current MSN status
If I ever have a problem logging on to MSN (when I say MSN I mean MSN messenger or Windows Live Messenger, not the Live Spaces or Hotmail which I believe run on different servers), then I always go to one website to check the overall network server status page. Here it is:
https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=passportform&ct=eformts
If you ever go to that site you can see a number of network messages, including the best one – The server is working normally and there are no problems!
Sometimes, however, the MSN status can not be reported on a ‘global’ scale (such as on the website which I just quoted). You must have been in the position (as I have) where you’re chatting with a friend and then suddenly every message you send starts returning a familiar message: ‘Your message could not be sent’. I have been in the position before when I have been having extremely important conversations on MSN when this error appeared and I could do nothing but log off and log on again. I’m pretty convinced that this is the only way of dealing with such a problem – to log off and wait. If you check the network problems website when you experience this type of problem they will always report that there is no issue, even though you KNOW that there is.
One final MSN status issue is where yo uchange your update message or MSN name and then save it – ok, no problem so far? But then – when you log off and go to a different computer, you will notice that sometimes your settings (like your profile picture, status message or MSN name) has not ‘followed’ you to your new location. There is also no way of checking the status of this ‘names server’ because it is on a different computer from the logon servers, so unfortunately you’ll just have to wait and change your info manually. It sucks, but it’s the only way.
Ok, that’s all the advice from me for now – I’ll be back with more MSN status info later!