Microsoft e-mail lost in cyberspace

2001-02-01 by Cydney Gillis Journal Business Reporter

It's unknown how 2-week glitch caused employees' messages to disappear

REDMOND -- For two weeks, e-mail from Microsoft Corp. was as slow as ``snail mail,'' taking up to four days to get to a destination.

That is, if it arrived at all.

Employees and outside vendors who work with the Redmond software giant have complained that outgoing e-mail arrived days late or disappeared altogether between Jan. 12 and 28. They could receive e-mail during that period, however.

Yesterday, Microsoft confirmed its e-mail system had a problem that the company is looking into.

Spokesman Adam Sohn said Microsoft does not know how many employees were affected or what caused the problem. But he said it has been fixed.

``We've had some reports of some folks experiencing delays with Internet mail delivery,'' Sohn said. ``We've done some troubleshooting and mail delivery appears to be working fine at this point.''

As late as Sunday morning, however, one local vendor received a Microsoft e-mail that was four days late, according to the time and date stamping found in the message's ``Properties'' box.

A Microsoft executive and an Eastside technology consultant who works with the company -- both of whom asked that their names not be used -- confirmed they experienced similar or worse problems starting three weeks ago.

In two instances, the consultant said, e-mail from Microsoft employees arrived three to four days after it had been sent.

There were also two projects in which mail he was expecting never arrived at all.

It ``turned into the response from hell,'' the consultant said of the last-minute calls he placed to get the return e-mails he needed. ``I had a hell of a time.''

So did the Microsoft executive. He said the e-mail system had eaten numerous messages to vendors, and gave no return notice to tell the sender what happened to them.

The problem led him to resort to sending e-mail through Internet portal Yahoo.com in order to stay in touch with vendors.

``It's not a very good advertisement for Exchange,'' the consultant said of Microsoft's e-mail server software. ``If Exchange 2000 devours outbound mail, I'm not going to buy it.''

If it wasn't the software, he added, then someone in the Microsoft department that monitors e-mail must not have recognized the problem -- or wanted to hide it.

``I'm pretty mystified (how) a company the size of Microsoft -- that depends on e-mail so totally -- could not have noticed'' no mail was going out, the consultant said. If staff members had been alerted, he added, they could have used alternate e-mail services.

But staff didn't seem to know.

That, he said, is a troubling sign for the company -- and the $200 million in TV spots Microsoft is running to tout its corporate server products.

``If you want to be an `agile business'(that makes) things happen quickly,'' the consultant said, quoting Microsoft's TV slogan, ``you have to be faster than snail mail. You've got to do better than this.

``If I found something as simple as communicating with customers via e-mail wasn't working and no one had told me, heads would roll,'' he added.

The external e-mail outage comes on the heels of Microsoft's domain-name servers ``losing'' all of the company's Web sites last week. That was followed by hackers temporarily blocking access to the Web sites Thursday and Friday.

Because separate server networks are used to route Internet traffic and e-mail, observers said it is unlikely the events are related.

Cydney Gillis can be reached at cydney.gillis@eastsidejournal.com or 425-453-4226.

http://www.eastsidejournal.com/sited/story/html/43234

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 01, 2001