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?

Comments

Re:Hmmm

[Black Parrot]

> 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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330,000 Hotmail Users Down

[The-Bus]

Being a casual Hotmail user, I pulled this from British news site The Register:

Following a server breakdown, these people were locked out of their Hotmail free email accounts for 10 days. And when the server was powered up and back online, many found that all their data, including addresses and saved messages, were lost.

It looks like Microsoft, Hotmail's owner-operator, put the repaired server back to work before fully completing data recovery routines. The company says that all data should be recovered, at some point.

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.