MSN Messenger service suffers outage

MSN Messenger users were having trouble communicating on Tuesday, as Microsoft's instant message service suffered intermittent outages. A company spokeswoman said the troubles began Monday night and continued Tuesday evening.

Full service was restored at about 5 p.m. PT.

The outage affected "a significant number" of the service's 145 million users, the spokeswoman said.

"(It was) an isolated issue at the data center at MSN," she said, but wouldn't provide additional details. The outage wasn't related to a computer virus, she added.

(MSNBC content is distributed by MSN. MSNBC itself is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

Users of other popular instant message services provided by Yahoo and America Online were unaffected.

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