Messenger status and error 800488fe

Since Monday of this week the Messenger service has been experiencing outages with signing in.  If you’re using Windows Live Messenger after using Reviver and you encounter this problem, you’ll see error 800488fe during the sign in process.  Third-party clients like Pidgin (libpurple), bitlbee and others have also been experiencing these problems and will have similar cryptic error messages.

I have seen a number of people attempt to explain the outage with explanations of the problem only affecting custom domains, age of account, or your current location but none of these have proven to be consistent and seem to be inaccurate.

Fixing the error
Although the error is a server issue, some people have reported that their account started working again after signing in and out of Outlook.com (Hotmail), so that may be worth trying.  However in all accounts that I personally have been affected with, I simply waited for a while and trying again later has worked every single time.

Hopefully these server issues will be resolved soon.