Cable Forum - MSN Messenger down?

Having problems here.

MSN v8 gives me an 81000306 error when trying to connect - says a problem with my internet connection (yet everything else works fine online).

Trillian (which I use all the time) connects fine no problems, but my list shows everyone offline (despite one of the kids being online MSN on their machine and I can't see them - and no, they don't have me on block :p)

I go and look at the service status and guess what!! "All systems are stable and running."

Yeah, right :(

This is just another reason for me to bin my hotmail account off and use yahoo instead. The new MSN live mail is pretty awful tonight too.