Microsoft officials said today's problem, which was resolved by late afternoon, was not related to the problem the company suffered late Tuesday and Wednesday. Domain-name servers are used to route Internet users to the appropriate website when they enter an address in their browser. This morning, Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn said the first problem was caused by a router that was reconfigured late Tuesday.
Routers control the traffic between the internal network and the outside world.
The company acknowledged that the second problem, however, was hacker related. The sites were apparently functioning normally again around 4 p.m. ET, Keynote said. Dan Todd, chief technologist for public services at Keynote, said this morning that several Microsoft sites began exhibiting the same problems that had plagued them earlier. And rarely are the errors caused by domain-name servers. Today's announcement is the second by Microsoft in three months that it had been successfully attacked by hackers.