In a March 2007 case, 75% of users for Microsoft's online services were unable to log in for 5 hours. Microsoft discovered that a bug with a partner's service had also resulted in too many authentication requests. Ravani described it as a "denial of service attack on Windows Live ID."

Microsoft improved its monitoring to detect such service failures more quickly, developed fine-grained throttling at many different levels of its architecture to prevent out-of-control traffic, and implemented a policy says "your transactions get dropped if they exceed quota, so you don't eat other partners' lunch."