Chatterboxes on Windows Live Messenger were in for a rude surprise last weekend: starting sometime last Friday, it appears that Microsoft started blocking YouTube URLs on its chat service; users received a network error instead of having their message sent.
The story broke on Slashdot last Saturday, and by late Sunday a Microsoft staffer acknowledged the problem – indirectly – and issued a fix.
A number of critics took note of the block’s timing, which B.E.T.A. Daily said coincides with Microsoft’s 20-country launch of video-sharing service Messenger TV.
Curiously, word of the YouTube block spread through – of all things – Twitter, and aided by the blogosphere, reached Slashdot early Saturday afternoon.
Windows Live Messenger product management team leader Dharmesh Mehta attributed the block to spam filters gone awry: “We are very serious about our efforts to block virus, malware and other harmful URLs from being passed on to our users,” wrote Mehta. “As some of you noticed, we had a problem from Friday night to Saturday morning where our Messenger service was incorrectly blocking some legitimate IP addresses.”
The block was only in effect “for a few hours,” said Mehta, and could be faulted to the third-party provider that filters messages for spam and phishing content. Contrary to the blogosphere’s “outlandish” speculations, he insisted, Microsoft “did not request to block any of the URLs that were accidentally blocked.”
“We are still investigating the specific reason our partner made these incorrect blocks and we will work with them to improve their process for detecting harmful URLs while not blocking safe one.”
To Microsoft’s credit, users at Slashdot claimed to have found a handful of other sites that were blocked as well, including blog sites Xanga and Google Pages, as well as DeviantArt.com, ebuddy.com, and MediaFire.com.
Whatever the reason for the block, it looks like Microsoft might want to work a little harder to regain control of its networks: between Xbox Live’s infamous Christmastime outage last year, another outage with Hotmail last February, and this – it appears that Microsoft’ track record for reliability has suffered a rather serious black eye. What’s next?