By Robert Lemos
Special to CNET News.com
January 26, 2001, 1:00 p.m. PT
just in For the fourth consecutive day, technical problems hindered access Friday to Microsoft's vast network of Web sites and services.
Access problems struck some of the software giant's Web sites Friday morning and by midday the sites were almost completly inaccessible, according to Internet performance watcher Keynote Systems.
"Around 10:15 (a.m. PST), it really went downhill," said Daniel Todd, chief technologist for Net performance company Keynote Systems. In the morning, 60 percent of Web page requests to Microsoft.com and MSN.com were successful, and by 11 a.m. that number dropped to 7 percent. "Most recently, one response out of 70 (has been) successful," said Todd.
Normally, the sites are able to fulfill 97 percent of all page requests, Todd said.
Repeated calls to Microsoft representatives went unanswered Friday morning and afternoon.
Friday's problems come less than 24 hours after the company said it stopped a denial-of-service attack on its systems that slowed traffic to a crawl for more than two hours. The attack followed an outage that began Tuesday night and lasted nearly 24 hours, which Microsoft blamed on a mistake made by its own technicians.
Ironically, the technical error that caused the first outage may have made led hackers to attack Microsoft on Thursday.
The original problem was caused by a lack of access to the company's Domain Name Service servers, the computers responsible for translating domain names such as Microsoft.com into numerical addresses that are understood by computers.
According to Paul Robertson, director of risk assessment for security service provider TruSercure, Microsoft or its network provider failed to create backup systems for distributing the DNS information across the Internet.
Instead, all its servers shared the same physical network--a security flaw waiting to be exploited, he said. "It is a poor design choice to not hand out server addresses on different network blocks."
The exposure and publicity about the flaw on Wednesday may have tempted hackers to attack the weakness on Thursday, he said.
Microsoft declined to comment on its network design for this article.
CNET News.com received several e-mails from readers Friday morning noting that access to Microsoft's sites was sporadic. The company's sites, which collectively rank as the third most-visited destinations on the Web, include MSN.com, Hotmail.com, Microsoft.com, Expedia.com, Carpoint.com and Encarta.com.
The outage may be another denial-of-service attack, this time against Microsoft's servers, said Keynote's Todd.
"It does not appear to be a glitch; it appears to be due to excessive traffic," he said. "If it is a DoS attack this time, it's a DoS attack against their Web servers. Yesterday, it was against their routers."
A denial-of-service attack overloads a site's servers with a flood of data, effectively blocking surfers from accessing the site.
On Thursday, Microsoft's major sites went down after a DoS attack was aimed not at the servers, but at the hardware switches that route data to the Web sites. Because these so-called routers were flooded, legitimate requests for Web pages were not able to be processed by Microsoft's servers.
The Seattle office of the FBI confirmed to CNET News.com that it is investigating Thursday's attack.
QUIT0, Ecuador (Reuters) - A boat carrying fuel to Ecuador's Galapagos Islands that ran aground four days ago is leaking oil into the ecologically sensitive waters near the famous islands, the government said on Saturday.
