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Wed, 29 Apr 1998 02:20:17 +0200 |
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The DNS change that solved the MSN.COM mail delivery problem has now
propagated and expired from caches, and just about everyone has confirmed
that mail is now coming in. We diagnosed the problem yesterday evening
with the MSN Escalation Team after noticing that there was something
wrong with the DNS data for MSN.COM. As you know, MSN technical support
had been telling people that the lack of incoming mail was due to known
problems with the MSN.COM servers and that these problems were being
worked on with high priority, so everyone assumed that this was indeed
the case and that the best thing to do was to give them a break and let
them spend their time working in peace rather than answering questions
and not getting any work done. But the problem that they had been
referring to was unrelated (at least we think so). Due to a shortage of
accurate, unemotional, first-hand information :-), it took a few hours to
pin-point the exact cause and location of the problem, but once this was
done MSN promptly fixed the problem. As it was a DNS change, it may not
have expired from caches until about now.
It is of course very unfortunate that problem resolution was delayed
because MSN technical support was seeing the same symptoms as for another
problem and providing the same stock answer, but in all fairness to them
this DNS problem was far beyond the knowledge of any level 1 support
person, or even a junior level 2 person. Remember that MSN technical
support deals mainly with questions from people who need help installing
their modem or configuring their mail client, etc. There must be
thousands of people calling every day to explain that they aren't getting
their mail, most of the time because their client is not configured
properly. Much as I think this should not have happened, I am not really
sure how one could train a level 1 person to tell these problems from the
one that was reported or the one for which they had the boilerplate about
ongoing changes. Maybe some kind of pattern analysis, a sudden surge of
complaints from avid mailing list users triggering a more in-depth
investigation, something like that. Either way, once it got to the right
people it was processed promptly. They were not aware of the problem at
all because the complaints had been identified as being something else
that involves entirely different people. Likewise there was no reason for
anyone to doubt the original diagnostic until enough time had passed that
it was starting to sound more and more suspicious.
Anyway, if your users are still experiencing the problem by tomorrow
morning US time, please let me know so that we can investigate.
Eric
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