Microsoft, Beset by Days of Outages, Says All Is Well

After a week of outages, blamed on human error and hacker attacks, that blocked access to many of its Web sites, Microsoft Corp. said Saturday that its problems were solved.

“Everything’s fine,” company spokesman Adam Sohn said. “Everything’s been fine since about lunchtime yesterday.”

On Thursday and Friday, hackers flooded equipment that directs Internet traffic in “denial of service” attacks that prevented many people from accessing its Web sites, including MSNBC.com and Hotmail.com.

The hacker outages lasted for several hours Thursday morning and for two 15-minute periods on Friday, the company said.

In addition, a 22-hour shutdown of Microsoft sites that ended Wednesday was blamed on an employee error involving the same network equipment.

The company maintains that Wednesday’s problems were not related to the Thursday-Friday outages. And while the hacker attacks were similar, Microsoft had not determined if they were related, Sohn said.

The company said it had notified the FBI.

On Friday, Microsoft apologized for the outages that began shortly after the company launched a $200-million advertising campaign Monday touting the reliability of its software.