Within the last few hours, the Messenger “bay” group of servers all went dark causing outages for a small number of Messenger accounts whom Microsoft has deemed only usable on that group of servers.

If this affected you, the error code you would have seen was 80072efd or in more useful terms, Can’t connect to server.

A good chunk of the servers have now returned and those accounts should now again be operational.

Given that we’ve seen larger changes happen around this time on Thursdays in the past, I highly suspect they were offline for some sort of maintenance, possibly related to the new Skype web client in Outlook.com.

As always, you can monitor the servers yourself by going to dx’s ever useful ismsndeadyet.com (choose “Click to show needlessly detailed server status”).