Microsoft expects to soon repair a hardware failure that has crippled its instant messaging service, cutting off all or part of the service to nearly one third of its customers around the world.

All MSN Messenger customers briefly lost service late Thursday, when Microsoft engineers were forced to reboot and restore all of the relevant servers, says Richard Bray, the vice president in charge of the online service. But Microsoft expects MSN Messenger to be back in service by the end of Friday, Bray says.

MSN Messenger is Microsoft's free instant messaging software and is used by 31.9 million people worldwide, according to research firm Jupiter Media Metrix. As early as Wednesday, some customers reported being unable to log on to the system or losing access to their personal contacts, or "buddy" list. The service was still unavailable to many users by Friday afternoon.

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Its chief rival, America Online, claims 28 million customers of its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service. But AIM has likewise not been without glitches; problems in April stranded some customers on two occasions.

"In this case, an extremely rare set of circumstances occurred when one of our database servers had a disk controller fail," Sarah Lefko, MSN product manager, said Thursday amid reports of problems with the service. "The backup for this controller also had an error occur, which resulted in it not being able to fix this issue immediately, resulting in the current situation."

Microsoft refuted reports that the outage was related to its Passport authentication service, a service that its e-mail customers use to log on to Microsoft services and other Web sites.

"The issue is hardware-related and MSN is now working closely with our vendors and taking appropriate steps on the back-end to resolve the issue and restore service to all MSN users worldwide," Lefko said.

Also, Microsoft is bundling a more advanced version of its messaging technology with the next version of its operating system. Windows XP, which entered final testing this week, is scheduled to ship on October 25. Called Windows Messenger, the application will come with text, video, and audio messaging capabilities, Microsoft has said.

While many users have lost access to their buddy lists, Microsoft representatives say the information is not lost.

"When the issue is resolved, customers' personal buddy lists will be restored," Lefko says. "There is no need for users to take any action to restore their personal buddy lists."

Bray says the company is in the process of restoring the backup data for the more than 10 million customers that lost access to their buddy lists.

"We expect to fully restore service sometime later today [Friday]," he says. "Until then, some customers may continue to experience an inability to log into MSN Messenger.