Microsoft restored its MSN Web sites and services Sunday afternoon that were inaccessible most of the morning and left many users unable to access game, Web-based e-mail, chat and search features, among others. The outage also brought down for a while MSNBC.com and Newsweek.com, which has a hosting arrangement with the Microsoft-NBC news site.

The outage is one in a series of recent glitches affecting MSN Web sites or Passport online authentication. Users could not access Microsoft's popular Game Zone Web site, nor could they log in to popular MSN chat rooms. Some Hotmail users also found they could not access the Passport log-in page for accessing the Web site. The outage also affected Internet Explorer 6 users, who discovered they could not search the Web using the default setting. IE 6, which is integrated into Windows XP (news - web sites), uses MSN for Web searches. "This also affected people wishing to sign-out of their Passports on the Zone.msn.com site, causing a potential security issue for that segment of their Passport access," said Shane Johnson, a network/messaging consultant from Puyallup, Wash.