Recently we had some availability issues with MSN Spaces which have caused some  complaints from some of our loyal customers. Mike Torres addresses these issues in his post Performance & uptime which states

One of the hardest parts about running a worldwide service with tens of millions of users is maintaining service performance and overall uptime.  As a matter of fact, a member of our team (Dare) had some thoughts about this not too long ago.  While we're constantly working towards 100% availability and providing the world's fastest service, sometimes we run into snags along the way that impact your experience with MSN Spaces.

 

That seems to have happened yesterday.  For the networking people out there, it turned out to be a problem with a load balancing device resulting in packet loss (hence the overall slowness of the site).  After some investigation, the team was able to determine the cause and restore the site back to normal.

 

Rest assured that as soon as the service slows down even a little bit, or it becomes more difficult to reach individual spaces, we're immediately aware of it here within our service operations center.  Within minutes we have people working hard to restore things to their normal speedy and reliable state.  Of course, sometimes it takes a little while to get things back to normal - but don't believe for a second that we aren't aware or concerned about the problem.  As a matter of fact, almost everyone on our team uses Spaces daily (surprise!) so we are just as frustrated as you are when things slow down.  So I'm personally sorry if you were frustrated yesterday - I know I was!  We are going to continue to do everything we can to minimize any impact on your experience...  most of the time we'll be successful and every once in a while we won't.  But it's our highest priority and you have a firm commitment from us to do so.

I'm glad to seeing us be more transparent about what's going on with our services. This is a good step.