Following a Digitimes report on September 28 that Taiwan consumers are seeing their Windows Live Messenger accounts blocked due to entering a wrong password too many times, and despite officials from Microsoft saying the company is already working aggressively on the issue, many consumers still claim that the company is working too slowly and it seems that the company's official forums for Windows Live Messenger in both the US and Taiwan are being filled with complaints from users.
Looking at the forum in the US, most threads appear to be from users unable to log in to their account because of the blockages, several of which have been marked indicating the problems have already been solved. But turning to previous pages, the number of threads that are still showing problems are a lot more than those checked. The same thing goes on the Taiwan forum.
A Digitimes reader in Taiwan responded to our original report to comment on the issue:
"I have to say after six days being unable to login to Hotmail, I am furious. Would you please escalate the issue through your media to make Microsoft feel that this is serious for it's user?
"The users are feeling helpless, you can see the complaint on the website. People have trusted the service for over 10 years, their paper, email, file... business related, school related, or even medical related information are store on their server. All the sudden for no reason the service are being suspended. Called the Microsoft support, the answer is standard... to be patience, keep waiting. I know hotmail is beyond their support for Microsoft Taiwan. So what can we do? Nothing at all.
"I already submit the request like Microsoft told me to. But based on my understanding they need to check one request after one manually. How many are there and how long does it take? Hotmail has a reset password security scheme already, how come this is not working. Can I assume they completely lost our account information?
"The industry is promoting cloud computing recently. This is the worse case for cloud computing application and could set back the cloud computing for 10 years.
"As a reporter, I appreciate every little thing you could have done for us."
Microsoft has been working aggressively on its social network sites, aiming to compete against the giants Google and Yahoo, but its customer service handling of this incident has failed miserably; not only has the company not solved the cause of the problem, most of the users being blocked are still waiting for their problems to get solved.
A successful social network site is propped up by its loyal supporters and users now can only hope Microsoft picks up its pace and does a full diagnosis over what is causing the problem, or they just have to move on to a new choice.
