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February 16, 2010

Hotmail back up after Tuesday outage

Posted: 06:03 PM ET

Access to Hotmail and several other Microsoft services was restored Tuesday afternoon after a server outage made it impossible for many users to sign in and access their e-mail.

The Windows Live ID service, which includes the free Hotmail service, instant messaging and new Xbox Live accounts, went down at about 12:30 p.m. ET, according to a Microsoft statement.

The problem was fixed in about an hour, Microsoft said, although customers were locked out for a while afterward.

Arthur De Haan, a Windows Live spokesman, said a server failed, increasing the load on other servers. A new server was brought into rotation, but it took a while to resolve the logjam of attempted sign-ins and to redistribute that load among the working servers, he said.

“As with all incidents like this, we will fully investigate the cause and will take steps to prevent this from happening again,” De Haan wrote on the official Inside Windows Live blog. “We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you, our customers and partners.”

Hotmail is one of the two most popular e-mail services in the world, along with Yahoo! Google’s Gmail is third.

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Filed under: computers • consumer tech • e-mail • Microsoft Corp. • technology


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The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Hotmail poops out on Tuesday   February 17th, 2010 12:39 am ET

[...] poops out on Tuesday Hotmail, or Windows Live Mail, or whatever they're calling it lately- went down today about 12:30pm ET. A rep said, "A server failed." Posted by Brinke at 8:39 pm [...]

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Pete4   February 17th, 2010 11:16 am ET

The spammers of the world will be so glad. Who uses Hotmail?

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Ola Daniels   February 17th, 2010 1:30 pm ET

It happens....microsoft is forgiven....

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Christopher Cacace   February 17th, 2010 1:35 pm ET

Why is this news? Websites go down all the time. I know Hotmail is a big one, but it was fixed within the hour. Is this story really beneficial to anyone? It's not like people "inconvenienced" by not being able to check their email for an hour have been furiously checking news sites for a reason why.

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Jay   February 17th, 2010 2:17 pm ET

Why does this happen

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maggie   February 17th, 2010 3:22 pm ET

I do, Pete4, and usually without any problems. Spammers can find you anywhere. I get more spam at work than I do on my home email.

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Dave   February 24th, 2010 7:16 pm ET

Hotmail is the absolute worst place to have a free e-mail address. You would be far better off to get an e-mail address from your internet provider.

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Mike   July 15th, 2010 10:50 pm ET

It may have been down for a little while, but here it is, 15th July 2010 and it"s STILL DOWN!. Not only that, but most/all? of the Executives, hiding their faces in shame – won't accept calls from customers.
This so-called "free" email is costing me a fortune!
I havn't been able to access my mail for over two days. Six or seven support departments in Microsoft were unable to find any resolution to the problems. No one ever acknowledged that there was a problem. Seems that it's all my fault – Sorry folks 😉

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Terry   September 20th, 2010 6:58 pm ET

Windows Live is down again, has been for the lasl 8 hours or so.

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