Msn E-Mail Service Interrupted

Microsoft Network has shut down its electronic mail service at least through this morning to double capacity that would prevent more of the overloads that have caused problems recently at the online service.

The company said the Wednesday evening shutdown is expected to last 36 hours, but Jeff Sanderson, MSN general manager of marketing, said he didn’t know for certain when the service would be restored.

Sanderson said the volume of MSN e-mail is up more than 50 percent in the past four or five months.

None of MSN’s 2.5 million users worldwide will be able to look at existing e-mail or receive new messages during the shutdown. E-mail sent during the outage will be delivered when the service comes back up.

Microsoft said it accelerated the upgrade because of e-mail delays earlier in the week.