So recently Microsoft was doing some­thing. I say some­thing because I don’t know what it was they were doing, only that it affected many users of the pop­u­lar chat client Live Mes­sen­ger (MSN Mes­sen­ger for those not both­er­ing to keep up). Basi­cally it cut off a good sec­tion of people - myself included - from the ser­vice. The best part is that dif­fer­ent people were get­ting dif­fer­ent error mes­sages, and there were dif­fer­ent workarounds that worked some of the time.