Patent 7987392 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on July, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A status of connectivity between servers of different sites (locations) is used to infer whether a network or a server failure has occurred such that data between the servers can be routed more efficiently reducing unnecessary network traffic due to duplicate messages. Servers may be grouped based on location or other characteristics and connectivity status determined based on the communication status of individual servers and their respective groups.