I can not ping microsoft.com but can open it using browser

Solution 1:

In this particular case, microsoft servers blocks/drops ICMP packets and don't reply to them at all. For such cases is better use other tools like nmap to have an accurate result:

nmap -p 80 microsoft.com

Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-03-03 13:08 AST
Nmap scan report for microsoft.com (65.55.58.201)
Host is up (0.14s latency).
Other addresses for microsoft.com (not scanned): 64.4.11.37
rDNS record for 65.55.58.201: 00001001.ch
PORT   STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open  http

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.65 seconds

As you can see the "host is up" even through it doesn't answer the ICMP echo packet.

Solution 2:

I am unable to ping microsoft.com as well. This does not indicate any sort of problem. Many servers block this sort of traffic out of security or performance concerns. amazon.com similarly does not respond to pings.

Solution 3:

Being Unable to ping a domain on the internet does not mean that the domain is down.

Ping is based on ICMP protocol and some domains stop receiving ICMP pings in their firewall to prevent some kind of SYN attacks (hacking technique)

So You should not use ping to see if a website is up or down. Instead, use telnet for websites on port 80

telnet microsoft.com 80

or use host to detect IPs/namserver

host microsoft.com

Solution 4:

Here i will show you how Microsoft.com block ICMP requests .

ICMP means Internet Control Message Protocol , echo request and echo response are the two operation codes of ICMP used to implement ping .

Bad ICMP packets are used for attacks such as :

Ping of death

ICMP flood attack

ICMP nuke attack

So Microsoft protect there Network by blocking ping_ICMP ana Traceroute_ICMP , so attackers want use it to exploit there system or know information about there network.

The Tracoute using ICMP (-I) option , shows that routers of microsoft block it and you can see asterisks , and blocking these ICMP packets , disable the ability to ping microsoft.com.