Cannot access Mircosoft's websites

This seems to be a common problem lately. Microsoft recently moved many of their sites out to a service provider, Akamai, and it turns out that many people are blocking a number of the akamai servers in their windows hosts files.

This is often done by certain spyware or pop-up blocker applications, though many people have manually added Hosts files from different providers like hpguru, smartin and others (perhaps even Spybot S&D's hosts).

Can you check your system for a Hosts file in either of these locations (below) and see if you have entries blocking any akamai servers?

NT/2K/XP: c:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\Hosts

ME/9x: c:\Windows\Hosts

- As this is not an actual alert for an available update, I'll move this thread over to "Software & Services" in a little while.

 

Ah, well that does make sense... The server at the IP address 207.46.249.190 is currently down. Because of that entry in your Hosts file, the only translation your system can get for www.microsoft.com is that address. So, you can't get there.

If you remove that entry from the Hosts file, when your browser is restarted and attempts to find the Microsoft site, it'll get a good address from DNS instead, and it should find the site just fine.

Oh, and I'd look for any other Microsoft related entries in the Hosts file and remove them, too. Those might have been added by some software to "speed up" access to Microsoft for some reason, but, since MS just changed all their addresses (well, because of the akamai thing), that address is no longer good.

 

Thanks JD, I'm glad it all worked out.

So far, we've seen a few different issues related to Microsoft's change in how their web content is being provided. Various privacy and security tools have either hard-coded addresses like in this case, or they've blocked akamai based domain names which now support Microsoft, so all that needs to be updated.

Spy1 noted an issue with "SpyBlocker" over in this thread. So, we'll all need to consider all of this when people have similar problems.

 

That's right. ".sam" is simply short for sample. There is usually a sample hosts file on all Windows systems. The active file is just named "hosts" and is located in the locations quoted above.