MS has technical difficulties

Microsoft confesses that servers, running its own software, are buckling under demand for Internet Explorer.

CNET News staff

Aug. 15, 1996 6:15 p.m. PT

Everybody knows about it, but Microsoft's admitted it: overwhelming user demand for Internet Explorer 3.0 has caused a meltdown of the company's Web site.

Explorer 3.0 was released at midnight on Monday. It was, as advertised, midnight madness. In the first six hours about 32,000 users managed to download and register copies of the browser, but since then Microsoft's Web servers have been unable to keep up with Explorer-hungry Net surfers.

Users are complaining so loudly about slow download times and "unable to connect" messages from the Microsoft servers that the company today put out a statement promising to add server capacity and additional bandwidth to remedy the problems. The site is run entirely off of Microsoft's own Windows NT Server operating system and Internet Information Server.