i have heard that you still cant get on - not that i tried coz i am not allowed to used it at work and i was told that you get this message if you try
The .NET Messenger Service from Microsoft is temporarily experiencing difficulty. You may be unable to sign in. If you are signed in, some features may be unavailable. Please try again later
From our own testing we also see that it takes forever to get messages through to your buddies. There is not much we can do except wait for Microsoft to fix this problem ;-)