In an embarrassing admission, Microsoft execs and engineers spent days trying to find the cause of a worldwide outage in its messaging, email and videoconferencing products before they discovered that they had accidentally unplugged the company over the weekend.

The admission was particularly humiliating because Microsoft support personnel frequently dealt with users who claimed the software was not working when it turned out they had simply forgotten to plug in their machine.

"We had a party, and some of us were hungover, and on Sunday morning one of us tripped over the company's power cord and ripped it out of the socket," said Paul Kim, a senior software engineer. "We have now placed the power lines against the wall, instead of running over the carpeting in the main hallway."