Since Microsoft's lawyers object to quoting statements from their website, I'll paraphrase. You can read the original at http://www.microsoft.com/info/siteaccess.htm for however long Microsoft leaves that page up. Microsoft reports a Microsoft technician made a change to a router (brand unknown :-) configuration disrupting traffic to the subnet containing essentially all of Microsoft's name servers. Microsoft classified the incident as "operational error." Note: I'm happy Microsoft says operational error, and not operator error. While there are some true operator errors, there are usually other factors involved and the operator just happened to be the one found at the scene of the crash. Microsoft also says the problem was not with any of their or any third-parties products. Wow, I didn't think I picked up the start of the outage that fast, 6:30pm. I thought it would have been building for at least a few hours. After 22.5 hours, Microsoft removed the change from the router's configuration, and saw an improvement. Hopefully, I'll receive a response to my inquiry to the msnnoc last night soon.