Originally we figured that the comedy of errors known publicly as the Microsoft web site outage was a simple movie of the week, but no-- evidently it's a multi-part miniseries instead. Yesterday we told you how Microsoft copped to the fact that a "staff error" brought the family of Microsoft web sites to its virtual knees for nearly a full twenty-four-hour period, which must have been incredibly embarrassing for the company that most less-educated mortals probably consider to be the Supreme Ruler of the high-tech universe. Microsoft was quick to assert that the problem was due entirely to human error, and not to any malfunction of the company's own products or software-- and it most definitely wasn't the result of any sort of outside attack.

Not long after that episode hit the airwaves, however, faithful viewer Mike Dini wrote in to tell us that "at 11:11 AM PST, the microsoft.com site is still down. Also the MSNBC.com site is still down." Needless to say, since Microsoft had reportedly fixed its little "issue" the previous evening, we regarded Mike's report as passing strange-- but lo and behold, he was mostly correct: Microsoft's site wasn't still down; it was down again. And this time around, the company couldn't lay the blame on some poor flunky who made a particularly unfortunate typo. Yes, according to an InfoWorld article, yesterday's unplanned downtime was due to an Internet vandal's "denial of service attack" that was unrelated to the "internal technical problem" that nuked Microsoft's sites Tuesday and Wednesday.

Interestingly enough, for whatever reason, several people had already considered Microsoft's claim that a DNS error has caused the first outage to be somewhat less than credible. Some of these individuals suspected that the original blackout had in fact been caused by the very type of denial-of-service attack that Microsoft admitted was behind the second outage. You do realize what this means, don't you? Our original insistence that Steve Jobs was blameless in Microsoft's web woes may well have been seriously incorrect. Not that we're accusing him, or anything, but a little investigation never hurt anybody. Meanwhile, it's Friday and Microsoft's site is functioning normally... but it's early yet, so we're considering starting a pool on what excuse Microsoft provides if and when its site takes a header later tonight. Dibs on "direct lightning strike"!