Michael John Muuss (October 16, 1958 – November 20, 2000) was the American author of the freeware network tool ping.

A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Muuss was a senior scientist specializing in geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital computer networks at the United States Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland when he died.

Due to its usefulness, ping has been implemented on a large number of operating systems, initially Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and Unix, but later others including Windows and Mac OS X.

In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley, honoring 180 individuals, including Muuss, who contributed to the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.

He is also mentioned in Peter Salus's A Quarter Century of UNIX and a link to his website’s ping page is included in How Linux Works (ISBN 1718500408).