Some AOL clients unable to reach MSN
Outage may be related to routing problem
By Jeordan Legon
CNN
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(CNN) -- Problems continued to keep users of AOL Time Warner's Road Runner high-speed Internet service from accessing Microsoft's popular MSN and Hotmail Web sites Wednesday.
The problem, which is believed to have started at 4 a.m. Tuesday, appeared to be related to the routing system that directs Internet traffic, Road Runner spokesman Mark Harrad said. Road Runner is part of CNN's parent company AOL Time Warner.
"We're not quite sure of the root cause yet," Harrad said.
Harrad said Road Runner, which has 2.9 million subscribers to its high-speed service, hoped to have the issue resolved Wednesday. He said he wasn't sure whether the problem kept all Road Runner subscribers from reaching MSN sites or just a portion.
On Tuesday, Microsoft issued a statement saying they received sporadic reports of problems.
"MSN Hotmail experienced limited technical difficulties affecting a small set of accounts," Microsoft said in a statement. "Our information indicates that the majority of customers were unaffected by this disruption. We take any service outage very seriously and work to resolve all issues as rapidly as possible."
A spokeswoman for Keynote Systems, which tracks the performance of Internet backbones from the 25 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, said the company had not detected any major disruptions to MSN's service.
On its corporate site, MSN says it attracts more than 350 million unique users around the world per month.
