Can not connect to msn.com/hotmail.com

[Xailian]

background:
I work for a small company of about 50 users. 25 of which are running windows XP and the other 25 are on NT. The network is on an NT4 domain currently. We have internal DNS/WINS servers.

the issue: The following issue has been a problem for all the user...independent of their windows version since I was hired (6 months ago). Basically

http://www.msn.com

and

http://www.hotmail.com

have been acting oddly. Every day or virtually every day msn/hotmail go down and no one can access them. The odd thing is that is usually accessible in the morning and goes out at some point in the afternoon and remains out for the remainder of the day. what is odd is through all of this my mail notification through trillian still works. It is able to check if I have new mail message. Also, MSN messenger also works independent of the website access.

Attempted solution: We cleared the DNS entries and refreshed them. Our ISP told us to wait till it goes down again before we call them.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks.
Rob Shields

 

[aznluvsmc]

We need to know how your network is configured to access the Internet. Do you have a proxy server? When the site goes down, are you able to resolve the site name?

"It's about the journey and not the destination" - The quote of those who never make it

 

[Xailian]

No, we do not run a proxy server.

When the sites go down we do a ping/a tracert on them. The pings time out. The tracrts make it back to a sprint server of some sort then timeout (most likely the next hop is msn/hotmail). Naturally, everything it working fine today so I can't test anything at the moment.

Thanks for taking a look at this.

 

[maeron]

We have the sam problem as Xailian Some days it works great And suddenly it stops working. Sometimes We with english registred hotmail access it but not the one with swedish once. But most of the time none of us can acess ww.msn.com.

We can use MSN MESSENGER and se that we got new mails.

We are not using any proxy and when we trace it stops at the sprint server.

Has anyone ANY clue what this could be? It has started in the middle of july for us, before that it worked great.

Best regards
Martin

 

[minxca]

Hi,

Do you have firewall? Check if you have rule to block access to msn/hotmail during certain hours.

 

[Xailian]

Yes we do have a firewall. That was where we started...nothing in there that should prevent this in any way.