Executives at Microsoft Corp., a company famous for its employees pulling all-nighters, are likely going to be doing the same this weekend as they try to figure out what went wrong.
The software giant had what any high-tech organization would deem “a bad week,” with repeated
Domain Name Server problems that caused system-wide shutdowns throughout the week, at one time for as long
as 23 hours. As a result, Microsoft Web sites worldwide went offline.
It’s a problem that might lead the company to scrap its $200 million ad campaign promoting .Net services,
announced Monday, and work to revamp its entire network infrastructure.
.Net service is a combined package of its Microsoft Office, Visual Studio and bCentral, and the foundation
for what Microsoft planned as an empire moving from the PC to the Internet.
In the future, officials had planned on applications running over the Web, instead of through the home
computer’s hard drive, thus ensuring the company’s existence well into the first decade of the 21st
century.
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
Microsoft officials still claim a technician, who
incorrectly configured its network of DNS servers, was
to blame for the blackout Tuesday night and Wednesday
of popular sites like MSN.com, MSNBC.com, Encarta.com
and Hotmail.com. Even after the DNS servers were
fixed, many customers still reported spotty
reliability getting onto a Microsoft Web site.
That, in turn, officials say, weakened its network
enough for malicious hackers, called crackers, to blitz the network Thursday with a Denial of Service
attack that brought the site to its knees for the
second time this week. Microsoft reports its network
was down about five hours before the sites were
restored.
Microsoft placed a call to Federal Bureau of
Investigation after the DoS, although it’s uncertain
what can be done.
According to a member of the FBI’s press office, there
is not much that can be done after the attack is over
with, although agents take the report and run a
preliminary investigation.
Industry and security analysts were left shaking their
heads after learning Microsoft kept all its DNS
servers running on one IP subnet on the same network.
The setup ensured that a DoS attack, or common system
failure, could bring down Microsoft’s entire
collection of Web sites.
“This showed an exposure that should not have existed
at Microsoft,” Enderle said. “It indicates that there
is a critical problem that needs to be repaired in the
way they laid out their entire network and it will
take them a while to come up with a plan to not only
address this exposure but to address other exposures
that are likely to occur.
“What basically happened,” Enderle continued, “is that
somebody was sleeping on the switch and probably was
for some time, and the end result is they undoubtedly
have to change a large part of their infrastructure.
And the first part of doing that is to come up with a
plan so that they’re not creating more problems in the
process.”
Microsoft officials were unavailable for comment.
