Slashdot Mirror
What Happened To Hotmail?
Blastercbi1 asks: "I have an e-mail account with Hotmail and use it for all my personal e-mails and some business e-mails. The last time I was able to Log in was last Thursday. I waited two days (got used to the frequent short outages that Hotmail had) and still nothing. Finally I decided to contact Hotmail support. Well... I just couldn't. They just had one phone line which was down. And a bunch of automated e-mail support. I just would like to know if someone else had this problem and how they dealt with it. The only information I could find on this topic was at:
news.cnet.com . And from what I read, I have a feeling I'm in for a bad surprise!
(First thing I'll do when and if I get my account back is backup all my stuff and get an account with Yahoo!!)" Sounds like a good idea. Anyone have any more news about recent Hotmail outages?
...and then slowly began going down the toilet.
> Maybe you shouldnt be complaining about Microsoft if you cant get _your_ math right.
Whoops. My pseudo-dislexia presented it to me as "1%". Not like it makes any difference - "BFD, only a third of a million people can't get their mail." That really shows a lot more concern for customers.
> And that's not many when you consider that Napster removed that many accounts from a _much_ smaller userbase.
Which has precisely nothing to do with it. Napster was reacting to a legal challenge; Hotmail is (not) reacting to a technical challenge that could easily be fixed by a management that cared enough. (As I mentioned previously, at worst it would require spending a bit of money.)
As an aside, it might not be fair to criticise Microsoft in any case. Does anyone know whether Hotmail is run by MS employees? Or is it just a separate company that they 0wn but do not directly operate? I notice that the media are taking questions to MS and getting their answers there, but that might not reflect the way Hotmail is actually operated.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I don't want to sound like a complete waco but...
No problem - wackos are supposed to feel at home on Slashdot.
> It really doesn't seem too far-fetched to image that they would go to quite a bit of trouble to encourage this. And by running FreeBSD servers they also discredit a competetor as well.
I'm sure you're right about the kind of thing they would do, but I don't think this is it. If it is, it's being handled clumsily even by Microsoft standards.
What I am expecting is a scenario something like this: Some medium-sized company decides to switch to Linux. They make a big fuss over it, and make sure all the news sites talk about it off and on for several weeks or months. Then the big day comes, they cut over, and - surprise! - they have all kind of strange problems. They give up, and throw out Linux in favor of W2K. Since their Linux plan has been all over the press, everyone wants to know what happened. They spill their guts, warn everyone to stay away from Linux, and heartily thank MS for being there with a safety net. End of story.
Except that MS will handle it with their typical lack of understanding of the internet, where someone posts the story to Slashdot, the gurus read it and poke holes in it big enough to pass Bill's bank account through, and the whole thing ends up stinking as much as Mindcraft did.
I thought it was actually happening a few months back when a small company tried Linux and gave up, but I don't think that was a Microsoft-sponsored event, because there wasn't enough media coverage and one of the principals was too forthright about what they had done wrong and why they had failed.
I'm still expecting this play, though. It would be the next logical step for Microsoft, and they haven't made any big anti-Linux plays for quite a while now.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> My Hotmail account works just fine, no missing emails, address book, or whatnot.
It's really bizarre. Some of the (few) news articles on the subject seem to imply that your account is associated with a particular server, and that when that server is down you're screwed. No rollover. (Perhaps the stories left the wrong impression; it's perfectly reasonable that an account would be associated with a single disks, in which case a drive failure would put you out of the ring.)
What's really bizzare is that whatever the problem is, it shouldn't run for a reported 10 days (and counting?). If it's a bad drive, you replace it, restore the backups, and you're back in business a few hours later. If it's a bad server, you fail the accounts over to another one and you're back in business a few hours later. Or even buy another fsckin' server, if it's something with as high a profile as Hotmail.
Truly, it's beyond comprehension. Unless it was a simple drive failure, discovery that there were no backups, and an unwillingness to admit it. Unfortunately, this not only would explain the otherwise bizarre circumstances, but is also true to form for Microsoft's manner of operations.
Other things that show Microsoft's {cluelessness, lack-of-concern} are the outrageous claim that "less than one-half of 1 percent of its 67 million users" are affected (as if up to 670,000 customers didn't matter), and the text of the automated response from the help desk, which says [quoting from memory] that "the temporary inconvenience is so we can enhance the system to serve you more efficiently" (how much efficiency will it take to make up for 10 days' outage and a loss of data?).
Also, for better or worse, that last [pseudo-]quote seems to imply that the problem is nothing so simple (and understandable, though inexcusable) as a simple loss of a disk drive.
I can't help wonder whether they were trying to "upgrade" to W63K.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A common attitude I've seen is "it's free, what do you expect?"
The reality is that Hotmail is not free. You view banner ads, you give up demographics information, and you put up with having numerous partner services pitched at you.
I work at a company that also does web based e-mail -- cobranded to your site's e-mail domain and look&feel... This service is free for end users, and free for web sites.
Our attitude is that it is unacceptable for even 1 e-mail to be lost. Downtime is unacceptable -- although admittedly we've had our fair share.
We strive for excellence in reliability, and availability. Why? Because our users (several million), are entrusting us with the most important means of communication on the Internet.
It is my perspective that downtimes like this are unacceptable: you *are* paying us -- with information, in many ways a more valuable commodity than money.
Demand more for your demographics and your time. You deserve it.
-JF
MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
These problems are all with the backend servers, which if i'm not mistaken are Sun. Not that your theory still couldn't be used, but it doesn't seen likely.
More likely microsoft is waiting until the next hotmail upgrade to move it over to several thousand w2k boxes and putti advertisments everywhere saying how its now 20 times better.
And, do you mean to tell me you haven't backed that stuff up anyway? What, you actually trust Microsoft to do something right? Sheesh. Newbie. ;-)
Anyway, I like Hotmail; I like being able to check my email from anywhere I can find an internet connection. The longest downtime I've had was 12-14 hours once. They've lost and restored my messages (all of them) twice. They are notorious for locking people out of accounts that are too large. They obviously have some problems with spam. If they ever try to move their backend servers to NT again, I will probably be screwed.
That said, I like Hotmail. They pioneered free webmail, and they remain one of the better free webmail services out there. That doesn't mean you should trust them. It's fricking Microsoft we're talking about here.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
The article brings up a good point: Hotmail is a free service run by Microsoft. Those two words put togethere don't exactly spell 'reliability'... I don't exactly have important data on my Hotmail account (just some attachments), and if Hotmail goes down for a week, I wouldn't be too concerned, because I don't get most of my mail there, nor do I get any important mail, for that matter. I mostly use it as dumping grounds for webpages I need to register for (not Slashdot, of course).
I would read The Register's article. It brings up good points I don't necessarily need to repeat.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
He also thinks it's amazing because he can check his email from anywhere. I said to him, have you even heard about/tried any of the other services? No. So how do you know Hotmail is so good? Well, it's M$ he said. At which point I decided it might be easier to just not say anything at all. He also casually mentioned that he has over 100 spam addresses blocked at Hotmail. On my 5 non-hotmail addresses, I'm lucky to get 1 spam message a week.
And you know what the worst thing is ? He was asking me yesterday about what I knew about MCSE - he's thinking about doing it. Sigh...