signing in to windows live id failed

I cannot log into Windows Live Messenger. I get the following "We can't sign
you in to Windows Live Messenger. Signing in to windows live messenger failed
because the service is temporarly unavailable. Please try again later". This
has been happening for the past 2 days and also appears to be affecting
outlook connector as it keeps asking for a password.

Solution found in Windows Live Solution Centre. As follows:

Symptom:

User experiences a sign in failure with error 80048820.



Cause:

Invalid characters in the first name of the user’s profile



Steps:

Change the first name in the user’s profile

1. Go to http://account.live.com/

2. Sign in with the account in question

3. Click ‘Registered information’ link

4. Click the ‘Change’ link next to your name

5. Change the First name to something appropriate with no special
characters or the ‘&’ symbol.

6. Click ‘Save’

7. Attempt to Sign in with the application that was creating the error.


"JohnG" wrote:

> I cannot log into Windows Live Messenger. I get the following "We can't sign
> you in to Windows Live Messenger. Signing in to windows live messenger failed
> because the service is temporarly unavailable. Please try again later". This
> has been happening for the past 2 days and also appears to be affecting
> outlook connector as it keeps asking for a password.
>
>