Not that Microsoft's web sites go down a lot, or anything, but when they do, we're always amazed by the sheer volume of mail we get from faithful viewers quick to point out a weak spot in the Redmond Giant's online presence. Heck, even when Hotmail goes down for a 30-minute service upgrade at 3AM on a Sunday morning we get two or three alerts-- so imagine what happened when most of Microsoft's high-profile sites, including the all-important microsoft.com, all stopped working for about twenty-four hours on Tuesday night. You guessed it; our mailboxes practically choked on schadenfreude overload.

And why not? Clearly someone should be embarrassed, since a day-long site outage is pretty big news when it comes to a major operation like Microsoft. Imagine the uproar if Apple's site went dead for a day, for example. Things are back to normal, though, and despite the fervent hopes of several ill-wishers, Microsoft wasn't the target of a hack or a denial-of-service attack or anything so malicious. (So don't go investigating what Steve Jobs was doing at about 5PM PST on Tuesday evening.) According to a TechWeb article, the company was merely the victim of its own personnel's incompetence... which is probably even better, from the Microsoft-bashers' perspective. Apparently some Redmond flunky just "made a mistake in configuring the company's DNS, or domain name server, architecture." The company was quick to insist that "this was an operational error, and not the result of any issue with Microsoft or third-party products nor the security of our networks."

Can you believe that people actually buy products made by this company? Or that entire businesses (and probably even entire governments) rely on software made by this corporation, whose employees plunged the Microsoft web site into darkness for almost a full day? It's positively shameful! After all, what kind of rinky-dink outfit can't even keep its domain names working properl-- uhhh, actually, now that we think about it, maybe we should cut Microsoft a little slack...