In response to an interruption in the MSN Messenger service, MSN Vice President Rich Bray today issued the following statement:

"For the past few days many customers who use our MSN Messenger service have experienced service interruptions. Some customers have been without service for an extended period of time, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. For a brief period of time yesterday (July 5), it was necessary for us to reboot and restore all of our MSN Messenger servers as part of our efforts to restore service to all customers. The issue which caused this service interruption has been identified. An extremely rare set of circumstances occurred when one of our database servers had a disk controller fail. The backup for this controller also had an error occur, which resulted in a more lengthy path to full service recovery. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to all MSN Messenger customers. Currently, approximately two-thirds of MSN Messenger customers worldwide have access to the MSN Messenger service. We are in the process of restoring the backup data for the remaining customers who are still experiencing the service outage. We expect to fully restore service sometime later today. Until then, some customers continue to experience an inability to log into MSN Messenger. However, we want to assure our customers that their buddy lists have not been lost. We expect the issue to be resolved as soon as possible, and again apologize for any inconvenience this has caused."