As some of you might have faced problem with Windows Live Messenger blocking some of the URLs, now the problem has been fixed and this is what Messenger Team had to say :

"Greetings Messenger fans –

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. We sincerely apologize for any difficulties this caused our users. And we want to thank those of you that reported this problem to us so that we could quickly fix it. Because of your help, the incorrect block was only in place for a few hours.

As you can imagine, we are very serious about our efforts to block virus, malware and other harmful URLs from being passed on to our users. And we're continually working to improve this process so that we can keep our users safe without having a negative impact on your Messenger service.
There have been some pretty outlandish speculations on what happened so I'd like to give you some facts about our process for trying to block unsafe URLs and about what happened Friday night:
  • There are a number of factors that can be used to determine whether a URL is potentially harmful: number of times a URL is sent, the frequency of the URL being sent, the number of accounts the URL is sent from, manually checking the URL, comparing with other "block lists", etc.
  • When a URL is deemed harmful, a block can be instated for a specific URL (i.e. www..com/) or an entire domain (i.e. *..com)
  • This entire process for Messenger is managed by a 3rd party that is a Microsoft partner
  • On Friday, Microsoft did not request to block any of the URLs that were accidentally blocked
  • The blocks were made by our partner as a result of their process to block harmful URLs
  • 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 ones

As always, we're open to feedback on how to make Messenger an even greater service. And again, our apologies to the users that were impacted by this."

News Source: Inside Windows Live Messenger


There are 6 additional comments
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Quote this comment Reply to this comment #1 Posted by Terry_X on 12 May 2008 - 08:58
normally i would shout bs but hmm... reason seems quite legit.....or blame their troubles on 3rd parties ftw
(3 replies) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #2 Posted by tsutton on 12 May 2008 - 09:53
Seems silly that they explained how blocking works.

What happens if 100 of us send the url of http://www.microsoft.com to each other at the same time - it would get blocked?
Quote this comment #2.1 Posted by +Kushan on 12 May 2008 - 10:16
(tsutton said @ #2)
Seems silly that they explained how blocking works.

What happens if 100 of us send the url of http://www.microsoft.com to each other at the same time - it would get blocked?


They obviously have whitelists as well, or google would have been long blocked.
Instead of automatically blocking certain URL's, they should really have the software flag it and have someone check the URL out before it gets blocked.
Quote this comment #2.2 Posted by El Sid on 12 May 2008 - 12:24
The question is though, what other way is there?
Quote this comment #2.3 Posted by tsutton on 12 May 2008 - 13:50
(Kushan said @ #2.1)
They obviously have whitelists as well, or google would have been long blocked.
Instead of automatically blocking certain URL's, they should really have the software flag it and have someone check the URL out before it gets blocked.


True... but YouTube was blocked. Youtube is big enough to be on whitelist, right?

But then we don't know the secret of how it actually works.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #3 Posted by Dakkaroth on 12 May 2008 - 12:50
Man, if I had known they were blocking links, I would've used an alternative when attempting to do business with one of my design partners. I remember links being sent but not receiving. Didn't think nothing of it though.

Then again, I use Google's app now instead.
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