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SPECIAL BULLETIN
- MSN MESSENGER SERVICE RESTORED
July 11, 2001 - 7:15 am PDT

MSN Messenger service has been restored to all our worldwide customers. We sincerely regret the inconvenience you may have experienced. We know you rely on MSN Messenger to stay in touch with family, friends and business contacts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Our operations team worked to restore personal contact lists for every MSN Messenger account. However, there is a very small percentage of people who have lost their contact list due to unforeseen circumstances in the data restoration process. We apologize for this inconvenience. If this has happened to you, you will be prompted automatically to re-add each of your contacts when they log onto MSN Messenger the next time. As always, you can add contacts yourself via the "ADD A CONTACT" button from within MSN Messenger. Click [here] for more detailed instructions.
Thank you for your patience and your understanding. Please accept our apologies.
The MSN Messenger Team

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"The recent MSN Messenger outage was caused by a series of extremely rare hardware failures. MSN went to a third level of backup to restore the service and retrieve most customer data. Please note that the system that failed is not linked to Microsoft's Passport service in any way--your Passport information remains secure.
We learned during the final restoration of the service that approximately one percent of all existing MSN Messenger users will unfortunately not have contact lists restored as a result of this outage. This missing data is a result of an operational error that occurred as we were getting the service up and running and restoring data.
If you are among the one percent affected by this issue, when you sign into MSN Messenger you will receive a prompt to add new contacts in when people who were previously on your contacts list do one or both of the following:

1. Log into the service.

2. Add contacts via the "Add a Contact" button.

Please also note that we are taking the following steps to improve MSN Messenger:

- We have added additional backup systems to the MSN Messenger service.

- All future versions of MSN Messenger will include an "Import/Export Contact List" feature that will allow you to share your lists with friends and automatically save Contact Lists on your computers for additional protection and backup.

- We will expand communication efforts. We will let you know as quickly as possible when service issues occur and we will explain clearly what it may mean to you.
Again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this outage may have caused you... "