However, with the advent of Tencent's QQ, Line and other services, Redmond recently emailed Chinese users (on their Hotmail accounts, naturally) that the service would ride into the sunset on October 31st.
To give you an idea of how old it is, the service was created in 1999 by Microsoft to compete against AOL's AIM chat service (disclaimer: AOL is Engadget's parent company). However, we doubt too many users will get misty-eyed about its demise -- the only nostalgia we have is how difficult it was to get rid of.
