An accidental alert triggers a Live Messenger uproar

If one of your friends or business contacts on Windows Live Messenger has a different handle now than he did a few days ago, the reason may be because he received a message from Microsoft telling her she needed to do so, on account of a "recent system enhancement."

A blog post on Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger site yesterday explained that an unknown number of Messenger users may have received this alert in the center of their desktops. But the blog post apologized, saying the message was sent in error. "You will be able to continue to use your current e-mail address," the post read, "and there is no reason to make any changes."

But users were unlikely to have read the blog post before having clicked the link on the message, which sent them to this 2006 set of instructions. A user following its instructions would have been taken to a page where she's asked to replace her "sign-in ID." Now, for Microsoft's purposes, that's the user's e-mail address with which her ID is associated; but the instructions clearly said that failure to associate the Live Messenger account with a different e-mail address could result in not being able to use Messenger.

"If you receive an important service announcement from the Windows Live Messenger Service Staff that says you must change your sign-in ID in order to continue signing into Messenger, then you're affected by this change. We recommend that you take this action immediately upon receiving the notification. The process to change your sign-in ID is simple. If you don't make this change in the near future, you'll receive an error message when signing in, and won't be able to use the Windows Live Messenger Service until you change your sign-in ID," the instructions read.

Those instructions, sadly, applied to the initial deployment of Live Messenger 2005 SP1, back in August 2006. That service pack was supposed to have been a security enhancement, but ever since its deployment, some users -- certainly not all, but still a good number -- have reported periodic service disruptions.

Users who fill out the complete sign-in ID changing form may also end up changing their profiles as well -- the link to do so is included -- even though profile changes were unnecessary, even three years ago.

So yesterday's rerun of the SP1 deployment message from three years ago ended up triggering users who have had this problem ever since that message premiered, to voice their concerns to Microsoft as comments to yesterday's blog post.

"I just spent an hour trying to figure this problem out but can't with your endless links to nothing [but] support pages, and [I] finally come across this!" wrote one Messenger user yesterday. "Thanks! For wasting everyone's time!"

Some users reported not being able to log on in recent days, and suspected this issue may be related to it. Many others, upon receiving the message, suspected it was some kind of phishing scheme or hoax. And more than one made this suggestion: Why couldn't Microsoft use the same mechanism for sending the original false alert, to send another one that says, please ignore?

"I got one of these messages also, and if it weren't out of luck, I probably wouldn't have found this post," another user wrote. "Microsoft/Windows/whoever responsible, needs to make sure that all users know that this is simply an error. Sure, nothing happens when you do click, but people deserve an official explanation."

Another user gave up after her Messenger started sending sporadic porn links to all her Messenger contacts, and assumed that this message was simply part of the malicious Trojan reposnsible. "Most of my contacts have blocked me, she wrote, before adding, "Thanks MSN for the wonderful experience."