UPDATE: Microsoft Hotmail, MSN Outages Reported

Outages, which also included other MSN services such as instant messenger, were reported starting Friday morning and as of 5:20 p.m. eastern, the sites were still out.

A company spokeswoman acknowledged Friday afternoon that some customers started "experiencing issues" Friday morning eastern time. She said the team is looking into the cause and working on a fix although there is "no ETA yet."

It was unclear if the outages resulted from some sort of distributed denial of service (DDoS) or other attack.

By Saturday, the issue appeared to have been resolved although several online posters reported that they were still having difficulty logging onto MSN well into the weekend. Microsoft could not be reached for comment.

Such widespread problems are bad news for Microsoft which continues to push MSN as a viable alternative to America Online's AOL service and Yahoo.

The outages come on the heels of other bad news out of Redmond, Wash. On Wednesday, solution providers were advised that the long-awaited Yukon SQL Server release would slip from 2004 to 2005, as would the companion Visual Studio "Whidbey" offering.

Microsoft and its affiliated sites have been something of a bullseye for hackers and attackers of all kinds.

This report was updated Sunday evening.