Some people had to reset the time on their com­puter. Some had to un-​check the start­ing options (Remem­ber me, Remem­ber Pass­word, and Auto Sign-​In) and then do it man­u­ally. Others had to go and delete things from their reg­istry, and some even had to repair Mes­sen­ger and its Sign-​In Assis­tant. Then you had people like me for some reason or another Microsoft decided to totally cut off from their whole ser­vice. I mean a total cut off. I couldn’t access their ser­vice, I’d get a 404 when I tried to access web mes­sen­ger. Even their Live Mes­sen­ger Sup­port web­site was cut off from me, so I couldn’t even get pro­fes­sional help. It kept telling my my proxy set­tings were screwed up, when in real­ity I don’t even use a proxy at all.

I took it upon myself to try and uninstall/reinstall the prod­uct and I got half way there at least. I couldn’t rein­stall the pro­gram, because in order to install it the installer has to down­load the con­tents from their server. Since I was cut off from their servers I couldn’t do any­thing. Thank­fully I recently brought my old laptop out of com­mis­sion, and Mes­sen­ger worked just fine there. I finally got it work­ing over a day later when my Microsoft-​induced ban was lifted.

The point to this rant?

Don’t screw your customers.

I can under­stand that what they were doing could have been really super, duper impor­tant. I get that they had to cut a good sec­tion of people off from the ser­vice in order to fix what­ever it was. Hell a server could have gone up in flames, and we wouldn’t know the dif­fer­ent and that’s part of the prob­lem. They didn’t say any­thing, but instead let a good sec­tion of people go with­out a means of common communication.

This is bad practice.

If you’re going to cut off a good sec­tion of people from some­thing that many of them pretty much cannot live with­out, you need to say some­thing. The only infor­ma­tion I found on the sub­ject was what Google told me when I was trying to fix my prob­lem. All it told me was that there were a bunch of others in the same boat with no idea how to fix it.

I’m aware they have a spot­less image to try and main­tain (who­ever they think they’re fool­ing I have no idea), but when you screw over that many people by not saying any­thing, you cause more damage to your image than if you just came clean. Some­times being honest will cause you less grief in the end.

Had they returned a new error number or had a post some­where on the Inter­net that said what the hell was going on, I wouldn’t have both­ered writ­ing this post.