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MS Hotmail Offline For Hours
chalker writes "According to CNN, and others, the Hotmail online e-mail service, operated by Microsoft, was down for most of the working day on Friday, affecting 'a significant portion of MS customers.' People are also having trouble accessing products such as the MSN Messenger instant messaging program. The company said it was an internal problem rather than an attack on its system and that it hoped to have service restored by 5:30 p.m. PST. As of 8:15 PM EST, Hotmail appears to be online again."
I was getting a "Service Unavailable" but couldn't figure out if it was my flaky connection or Microsoft's flaky software. Guess now I know.
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
And here my girlfriend is blaming that stupid mozilla program. Try explaing that its Microsofts fault to someone who thinks that MS is infallable.
That downtime really blew. I couldn't read my spam.
Don't let it happen again, Microsoft.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
I thought they had blocked other programs again. Trillian and Gaim couldn't connect, but I installed MSN 6.1 and got right back on.
In Soviet Russia, Nigel makes plans for you!
God, how fucking petty is slashdot getting???
Sure, hotmail was down, boo-hoo. It's a free email service. Deal with it.
Why is slashdot determined to report every single trivial detail when it comes to Microsoft? Try to stick with the big stories, please, not "Bill Gates forgets to lift toilet seat!" or "Steve Ballmer takes up two parking spaces in Microsoft parking lot!"
(nt)
Perhaps a date in the story would have been more useful, since "As of 8:15 PM EST" is now just highly misleading. That 8:15PM EST was on Friday, March 12. This story is making it sound like it's been down for days, but in reality it was just a few short hours.
This story isn't even relevant at this point.
That article didn't go into much detail. I don't know what kind of system MS uses to run Hotmail, MSN and other services, but where's the multiple location clustered redundant load balancing system? My only guess is that someone at MS really messed up their own DNS systems, which of course would take it all "down" (by name at least). Does anyone know what actually happened?
You talk better than you fool!
I signed on in the morning and it was fine all day however I did wonder what was up since not many other people were logged on all day. Why this is a story on ./ is beyond me though.
Microsoft having a downtime so they can load up the FreeBSD grunts doing all the hard mailloads?
The question is - how many nerds use Hotmail.com, and why does this non-event warrant a front page article?
"The company said it was an internal problem rather than an attack on its system..."
:(
That must have been one heck of an internal problem for it to knock out Hotmail AND MSN Messenger. Maybe their servers BSoD'd!
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
So that's why I couldn't access my inbox full of ads for Penile Enlargement, Hot Sex, and credit cards...
Observers noticed a marked decrease in spam emails most of Friday. Analysts remain puzzled.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Judging fromt the description that people had problems logging in, but that things work fine once logged in, and OTOH that Messenger had problems too, I would conclude that the problem is with their Passport infrastructure.
Figures. Here I am at a client's house fixing his computer so the cable modem works again, and I'm trying to show him how good Proxomitron works with getting rid of all the Hotmail surrounding ads, and I can't even connect. He didn't believe me when I said that it was probably Hotmail being down....
Perhaps if it was some routine maintenance on Microsoft's part, they could forewarn people about it? It affects a lot of people's lives, whether free or not.
Visceral Psyche Films
Microsoft is very good at maintining their own products and services. Imagine how well Hotmail and MSN have to be configured to be in proper working order to gain respectible uptimes.
With that in mind, just remember: All those Windows boxes have to be restarted at some point. Hats off to MS for holding out as long as they did.
(Flamewar disclaimer: It's a joke. Laugh.)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
There should be a TOPIC/STORY negative modifier for old news, or news that is blatantly obvious. Or just have "FARK" tags. If this "story" about how hotmail was down ran on Fark, it would have the "obvious" tag.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
This story is soooo yesterday!
Dear Infidel /.er
Microsoft products and services never suffer any sort of failure that is not announced first. This was not exploited and service was not denied. With our services working, we suspect a massive monitor failure caused by a new virus coded by a member of the linux community. We enjoy providing hotmail, and DEATH TO THE SPAMMER!
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Director of Public Relations
Microsoft, Inc.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
What's broken about the "funny" moderation?
The shareholder is always right.
i just got hung up on, and that was approximatly the same time on friday. i was trying to get an activation code for win xp when i was disconnected from them all together. i waited a while thinking that like all good cutomer support they would call me right back because i was hung up on, but waited half an hour and called them to try to talk to the guy i was dealing with, and they told me that they were having serious internal problems. im not sure how it works, but i think MS might use some kind of internal VOIP system because there was a delay in speech with th guy i was talking to as well, but hotmail and their tech support both went down around the same time as i was informed of "major internal problems." so something big happened.
That must have been one heck of an internal problem for it to knock out Hotmail AND MSN Messenger.
For example, the problem might have lain in the Passport login servers. Single sign-on is a single point of failure.
Maybe it was another attempt to switch from BSD to Windows servers. Don't they know it doesn't work...give it up!!!
...Hotmail goes down on Friday, and you're the first to know on Sunday!
Anyone notice that whilst Hotmail was down their daily quota of spam reduced ;-)
What I found most alarming was that MS did
not know if they were under attack or not.
They first thought some hacker took down their
system. Then they realized it was some "internal"
fsck-up.
How can a service of that magnitude with M$
money backing it not realize it was/was not
under attack?
Even if there were some coincidental attack
going on at the same time (it's probably
a constant issue with big sites), it's
shocking that they could not properly analyze
the attack to see if it could explain something
like, oh, say, the ENTIRE FSCKING SERVICE
being unavailable.
In a way, this tells us plenty about the
quality of service. Not only does it go
down from time to time, but the company
running it is not able to accurately
communicate what the problem is.
On Friday I was tinkering with a student LAN I help maintain... swapping in new switches, trying to sort out a mess of identical ethernet cables.
:)
I was about to leave, satisfied that the network was back to running as normal, but people started complaining that they couldn't reach hotmail. That seemed weird since hotmail is typically rock solid... I got kinda stressed by this, thought maybe I was dealing with a bizarre netmask thru DHCP or perhaps a DNS failure.
What a relief... hotmail was broken
A website went down but is back up again!!!
Just because a Microsoft website goes down it is front page news. Seriously slashdot, your Linux loving policy is blinding you as to what is relevant and what isn't.
That said, both these services have millions of users. And from what I hear from these users, both services go down pretty frequently, messenger especially so.
Apparently things have gotten worse since MSN 6 came into being. I have seen MSN 6, and it has the words "lame ass" written all over it.
If what I hear is true, it takes 2 minutes to login to MSN 6. Quite a lot of your IMs are bounced back.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
Luckily I don't use Hotmail (or any other Microsoft product).
Strange, my DSL provider was down for the entier day on the 11th. And now Hotmail is down for an entire day. I think there is some sort of new tracking software being installed all over the net to see who is swapping files with whom.
:-)
[/tinfoil hat]
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
As of late at least it's been up more than the AOL IM servers... Though I still would never use Hotmail nor MSN Messenger due to the massive security holes and slow fixes.
CyberSpyder has spoken listen well to the words of the CyberSpyder
I was going to send the webmaster an email saying that the hotmail/msn services were down, but I couldn't get into my hotmail to send it. What do people do in these kinds of situations?
Microsoft basically wants to centralise everything in the future in longhorn.. And this pretty much proves that while it might be good for them, that major problems will arise.
.. For instance, Networks like MSN messenger are completely centralised.. Sure MS has full control over it, but unlike decentralised networks like jabber, if one server goes down, the entire network doesn't..
I'm hoping consumers learn from this and learn about the importance of decentralisation, and from now on make choices taking into account decentralisation too..
sorry, just thought this thread needed someone to expand on this little event
Can I sue for damages incurred because I couldn't order my penis enlargement pills before my porn audition? Damn you microsoft, you kept me from making millions! Now just give me some money and we'll call it even.
No "customers" were harmed. The only people who use Hotmail are people who are too poor/lazy to install their own ISP's mail system on their machines.
And if you base your business on Hotmail, i'd say you have a serious I.T. decisions problem.
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
recieved only one(!!!) lonely spam mail today.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
It reminds me of neo-marxist lesbian prolitariate comedy stylings. "Ha ha. I know this is funny because it reinforces my idiology. And after they paused expectantly, they smirked. Look, I can clap like a trained seal too! Where's my fish?"
Yours wasn't that bad, of course. But you did oversell the incongruity. It wasn't a surprise.
Why am I not surprised Microsoft claims its an internal problem?
Actually, it would make more sense when Microsoft would claim it was an attack. Internal problems can be blaimed on the company (bad software design, bad system administration, etc.), external attacks can't, only for a lack of security or something like that. But in most cases, a company gets away quite well with an external attack.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
yep, just the other morning (Australia time) ./ was down (completely down, DNS error) for about 4 hours!
People in glass houses...
GNAA rocks - cumming to your town soon!
From the MS case study on converting Hotmail from FreeBSD to 2K:
> Changing the operating system on each server should have
> zero impact on day-to-day operations.
No impact whatsoever....if you ignore uptimes
> Under FreeBSD, bugs and memory leaks would often go
> undetected because of the lack of tools. With Windows 2000
> and IIS 5, the tools exist to optimize the performance and
> truly understand exactly what the code is doing at all
> times.
Crikey, handy they've got all those tools to help them out (soooo unlike FreeBSD with all it's bug leaks). Looks like it's saved their asses this time round...
</sarcasm>
Microsoft: Where do you want go today?
Customer: I want to take a rock solid service that has true customer value and turn it into a spam ridden, bug infested hole that doesn't work half the time and customers hate.
Microsoft: Consider it done!
The Machine stops.
I hate to say it, but websites do go down. It's regrettable, but the reasons people here dislike Microsoft are not because they have a website that happened to go down. Blame Microsoft for their real flaws.
Heck, if the FOSS world was held accountable for, say, Sourceforge or Slashdot reliability, we'd all be in a world of hurt.
May we never see th
it would make more sense when Microsoft would claim it was an attack. Internal problems can be blaimed on the company ...
With Win2000, Microsoft was working hard to get away from their reputation for instability. Some of this they fixed with software changes, and some with marketing propaganda.
With Longhorn, Microsoft is working twice as hard to get away from their rep for insecurity. At least for the moment, it is better to have their systems appear a tad unstable than insecure.
jwg
I seem to remember /. was down for a few hours last week... but somehow that story didn't make the front page.
-a
I was thinking - why did they post this as a story, who cares about Hotmail downtime, ...but then I realised that it IS important, it just goes to remind us all of how invasive one single company is, so invasive that in the software area that I specialise is, although there are well over 20 equivalent products, I already have to assess the QUALITY of products as such:
.. 80% on dominance, .. 10% luck, .. and 10% on product features
1. Microsoft: assessed:
- it will get 15-50% of the market simply because of who it is, and will either be Market leader, or number 2.
2. All the others, which get assessed mainly 50-90% on product features.
So then of course the advice has to be, well one of the advantages of selecting the MS product because you know that you won't have to convert the data from some other system that will be driven into the ground by MS.
I can only advise clients the "truth" - that is what I get paid for, but I am not happy with this situation.
In this particular market segment, I can say that MS would not get in the "top 3" in terms of features.
This is a terribly sad situation to be in, and people need to be reminded of this regularly. The lack of action by authorities on Monopoly practices appears to show that the MS Billions have won the day.
I am not a Linux-plugger, and I know that MS has produced some good services, however these days they are way beyond the scope of traditional monopoly abuse. Are all politicians and scientists out there so "chicken" or greedy?
------------------
no sig. of course!
...those people should stick with their American Online CD disks for downloading on the interweb!
Fortunately I escaped from supporting the end-user general public several years ago, but it was many years earlier that Hotmail stopped working for me. As I recall, it was shortly after Hotmail was purchased by MS that my entire mail quota could be filled with spam in mere days, and it was then that the system got so sluggish and unreliable that it was never a surprise when I couldn't use it. (Microsoft is really good at some things, not least among them making people feel like pawns in billion dollar chess games.)
There really was a time when I both used and liked Hotmail. I think that time was 1997.
But as you point out in your post, the innocence of those simpler days is still alive, like a proverbial chest-burster from Alien, in the hearts of many Internet users.
I've seen commenters use the term ./ instead of /. to refer to Slashdot. Is this a mistake or is it a cute way to say current directory (meaning *this* website)?
Um, you haven't heard about spamgourmet yet, have you?
yesterday I was installing a machine
and windows updates was down,
msn (web) was down and www.microsoft.com
also!
For about 2-4 hrs.
Guess there's still time for maybe 2 out of 5?
Remember, a truly wise man never plays leapfrom with a unicorn
Doesnt seem just alittle odd to you that at the same time that Hotmail goes down there is also a problem with an office update that is "clogging Spam Filters"
g =n efd_top
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5172968.html?ta
This just after Uncle Bill suggests that the ONLY way we can get rid of spam is to start charging for every email we send (and of course the methiod would just so happen to be a way for Mircosoft to make oodles of cash)
Sounds like the next step is for microsoft to come out and say "See we spam filters are waaaay too much trouble , lets just go with Microsofts idea of Microsoft EStamps instead...buy them now"
And for those that will say But Uncle Bill Said we could pay for them by allowing our computer to proform some kind of math problem for each email...That may be how it starts. But soon they will start saying how people just want to have the convience of paying for the stamps (and at about that time the math problems start getting alittle tougher on your computer and maybe take just alittle longer ect) The next thing you know people will be bitching about the new price increase on email stamps....
and as for Hotmail being free (tell that to the Hotmail paying customers) Theres only 1 reason MicroGovern...err Microsoft does anything for free and thats to get it spead wide enough and used enough to become a NEEDED thing and then find some way to make cash off it.
Doesnt seem just alittle odd to you that at the same time that Hotmail goes down there is also a problem with an office update that is "clogging Spam Filters"
g =n efd_top
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5172968.html?ta
This just after Uncle Bill suggests that the ONLY way we can get rid of spam is to start charging for every email we send (and of course the methiod would just so happen to be a way for Mircosoft to make oodles of cash)
Sounds like the next step is for microsoft to come out and say "See we spam filters are waaaay too much trouble , lets just go with Microsofts idea of Microsoft EStamps instead...buy them now"
And for those that will say But Uncle Bill Said we could pay for them by allowing our computer to proform some kind of math problem for each email...That may be how it starts. But soon they will start saying how people just want to have the convience of paying for the stamps (and at about that time the math problems start getting alittle tougher on your computer and maybe take just alittle longer ect) The next thing you know people will be bitching about the new price increase on email stamps....
and as for Hotmail being free (tell that to the Hotmail paying customers) Theres only 1 reason MicroGovern...err Microsoft does anything for free and thats to get it spead wide enough and used enough to become a NEEDED thing and then find some way to make cash off it.
With Longhorn, Microsoft is working twice as hard to get away from their rep for insecurity. At least for the moment, it is better to have their systems appear a tad unstable than insecure.
Yeah, I believe Hotmail.com was "testing" the new Longhorn beta on their servers, but some bug caused them to roll back to the previous build.
Perhaps you should find a new industry to participate in, since you are so unhappy with the way things are.
Life is too short.
Make it a goal to ban the words "boxen", "virii", and "pr0n".
Even MS has to patch their own servers.
TechAdmin: We have to install the latest Mediaplayer updates on the Hotmail servers.
Executive Manager: Why, that means downtime - for every minute downtime of hotmail.com I get less bonus! The servers stay up!
TA: But we have to install these updates because without them we can not patch the servers.
EM: Why do we need to patch the servers?
TA: To make them more secure.
EM: But we use our own MS Products...
TA: That's we need to patch so often!
EM: But the latest patches were not labeled even 'critical'
TA: That's because of Steve and Bill and the guys from marketing, so they can tell everyone that our products are secure.
[May someother continue...]
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Setting up a hotmail account wich you know is going to be spammed is poetic justice. Most of the spams come from rooted windows machines anyway. Let their servers deal with it.
Oh and for those who wonder where the story is? It is in the comments. You can see the windows zealots all fuming that /. dares print a story on MS having a screwup. The same people who say constantly linux sucks because it can't work with their $5 dollar noname soundcard (despite the fact that this is an old old old complaint) can't deal with others sniggering a bit about the fact that Hotmail was down for half a day.
Zealots are people who can never see the other guys point of view but it is important to remember that /. is not just Linux zealots. We got them all. Mac/Windows/BSD/Linux/Console/PC/etc.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This seemed to affect the MSDN Subscriber Login too. I couldn't log in on friday.
I don't think that says what you think it says.
Oh and I know english is not the first language of many people. I myself make many a mistake but yours is big since it ruins your point.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Routing to Slashdot occasionally has problems passing through Clueless & Witless space, but that's normal.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Hotmail is STILL not completely working. I have a trash email account on hotmail from back before hotmail was owned by MS. The web-based interface is working, but there is no access from Outlook.
When it comes to 'free' things on the internet, the old phrase 'don't look a gift-horse in the mouth' just doesn't apply: You should be giving that horse a full dental exam!
People do have a right to complain if they feel a service is bad, even if it's free. Especially if it's a service such as e-mail, which is a pain to switch. It takes time and they know this and exploit it.
ahhh MSDOS 3.1, you mean. MSDOS 4.0 was buggy. If you installed it with defaults, it used all your memory, with too little left for programs.
I wondered why I wasn't getting so much spam yesterday.
Google news has been running the headline:
"Microsoft restores faulty Hotmail service"
I thought that said it all.
I remember a guy in my company yelling "Damn Netscape. *** Bill Gates!"
I decided not to share my wisdom with him.
if someone took down hotmail. Imagine that for PR! buy our products that even we cant protect ourselves with.
It was a .NET Passport outage. Even if you have no clue what this is, you almost certainly have one if you have a hotmail email address, or use MSN, or MS Money, MSN messenger, or a million other services. It's even used for RADIUS authentication of MSN dialup users.
Unlike Hotmail, which still runs primarily on UNIX, Passport is entirely based on Windows servers.
Passport is the authentication / single sign-on system for all these MSN services. If it's down, everything's down. And sadly it has proven a little unreliable recently, for reasons never disclosed.
Really, Message Authentication Codes arn't popular? I thought they were used all the time.
Come on people, it's short for Macintosh, not some sequence of words. Unless you write people's nicknames in all caps, this should be easy to remember.
People do have a right to complain if they feel a service is bad, even if it's free.
Note to self:
Next time I start a free service, make clause 1 of the user agreement something to the effect of "Your right to complain about the Service is herby irrevocably revoked".
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
No, they just locked you out for posting on /.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I've never encountered a situation when Trillian won't connect to MSN but the official client will. That used to happen with Yahoo but they fixed it when Yahoo tried to ban them (must be ironic for Yahoo, their attempt to ban other clients improved Trillian). MSN tried to do a simillar thing but the patch was out way before the actual blocking happened.
Paid for services, such as MSDN subscriptions, were down as well. The real news is not that Hotmail was down, but that all Passport based services were having problems. MS has been trying hard to sell Passport as a "single sign on solution." This indicent does not help that marketing effort. This is not the first time that Passport has been out. In the past the passport domain expired and was rescued by a very nice person who registered the domain on a weekend, reinstating the service.
You know, it's a damn good thing that MS has .NET. I mean, *every* one knows how undependable things like YP, NDS, Kerberos, and SHH are...
OK, all joking aside, I am really ticked that a common authintication system that works darn near everywhere isn't available. Every OS wants to piss in the cup and change the flavor when it comes to users and logins. Novell wants NDS, Microsoft wants .NET/Active Directory, Unix gives several choices but none work all that well with the other (non-Unix) OS'es, most won't work with applications.
I can't tell you how many times the big cheese come around and say "We want single sign on. Make it happen." and then spend the next few weeks proving to them that signle sign on is just really a bunch of marketing hooey. (Oh, yeah, they also want it to work with external sites, too. Sheesh. Imagine when it gets hacked. Now the hacker gets access to everything internal (via VPN) and since most nitwits use the same password everywhere, probally their bank account and porn sites that arn't part of the system. Sheesh.)
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
... that they had to swap out and reconfigure a faulty load balancer on the passport authentication gateway. If you were already logged on, it didn't affect you, since passport services shunt you to a different server when you're logged in :)
;)
Oh, and you're all hypocritical bastards. How dare ya'll go using MSN like that? You'll just make baby Linus cry
I tried to make use of this outage to help convince people to switch from MSN Messenger to Jabber. Unfortunately everyone I know seems too entrenched in the Microsoft way of life to even consider switching. Jabber offers many independent servers so if one failed people would still be able to use another server.
Crap service no use
Sharereactor is down for days !
Naw...They are still running UNIX.
/home/$WEIRD_RANDOM_STRING/$USERNAME.
It was not a global problem.
SOME servers went down.
but when i was trying to help people get thier email working thier mail was still in good ol
I would bet half a decade before hotmail is "unix free" (and not even then methinks.)
you gotta remember all the INTERNAL stuff that depends on those servers.
My admin login to the mail server is not on the msn.com or hotmail.com domain, but it's still a passport account.
A different set of credentials that let me in the msn customer database??
You guessed it.
They depend on the same servers joe six-pack depends on to deliver his virus of the week.
My login to the passport tool? same thing.
So all im really saying is that I know that even the front line tier 1 people cant do thier jobs if hotmail/passport is down.
I know I sure as hell cant.
"ok mrs. jones, I will send a ticket up to tier 4 errr....well, i guess i could send something to qwest...nope.....well hell mabye I'll just stop being a lazy fuck and fix it myself.Nope thats out too. cant log in to the servers."
that would go over well.
Cant communicate with the noc, the backbone, tier4, even qwest for gods sake when passport goes down.
And I'm just lowly tier 3 support.
There are *pinky in mouth* biiiiiiillllions*** of microsoft employees who NEED those to be up ALL the time.
***not really billions
Not swithing to windows anytime soon I assure you.
However weve been kinda slow these last few weeks...Perhaps a well meaning kiddie could take down the passport servers and make work a little more interesting.
(On a side note, whats everyone think of Services for unix? I still gotta have my linux...but i have to say with that and exceed on xp...makes these gaming boxes actally usable.)
kinda weird when i fuck up and type "ls" at a dos box and it works!!!
sorry for being AC...but thats the way its gotta be.
Here is a story from The Register (from two years ago) talking about MS's ongoing problems in switching from BSD to Windows. Of course, this story was from December 2001, so I assume it's changed since then.
t ml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/23348.h
Sure, it was on the front page, but HELLLOOOOO, the service was down so you didn't see it. You must be one of those tech support guys who send me my password in email when I forgot my email password.
Nelson Munz:
HAH-HA!
I'm working on Sunday now installing servers for a Customer because on Friday I couldn't authenticate to the Microsoft "eOpen" licensing site to retrieve my Customer's "volume license keys" for Windows Server 2003.
(No-- I don't like that they bought W2K3. Yes-- I wish they were using Free software solutions. No one listens to me.)
Jim(staring at Software Update Services admin page): Hey, Dave! Is it safe to apply this Combo-Uber-Hyper Security Update Patch for March 2004 for SQL, IIS, MDAC, Windows Scripting MediaWotsit Turbo?
... clicks 'roll back' button... minutes pass... sirens continue
.... those damn Roll Back engineers, I swear they just party all night and turn up to work with hangovers.... Well that's the final straw! I'm quitting. I'm gonna learn me some SCO and go work for EV1Servers. Ha!
Dave (not really paying attention): Yeah. Sure. Why not. We've got that Magic Roll-back Button they told us about in MSCE class, haven't we...
Jim: Cool. click... Uhh.. Approve.. yeah, that's it. click... Woohoo. Damn, this makes patch management easy! Christ, I'm smart.
FX: Alarms... sirens... flashing lights...
Dave (sighing)
Jim: Uh-oh. I'll call someone.
Dave (rising panic): But.... the button! It said... roll back! (..close to tears now...) Oh, why does this happen every time... *sobs*
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
I've,
/
Gotton rid of MSN altogether in my life by going as far as putting the following entry in my robots.txt file:
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow:
They only ever accounted for a few legit hits a month on my website anyway.
Using this technique may make MS less able to dominate the Internet. Or it might not. You never know...
Caution: Contents under pressure
.. about a week or two ago all of java.sun.com , www.javasoft.com etc was down for more than a day. Not only did this affect people trying to surf on java-related pages. It also affected some java tools that tried to validate EJB deployment descriptors as the default DTD was located at this server. Certain default ant tasks hung since they tried to do lookup of http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/ejb-jar_1_1.dtd, and this was not available. I wonder how many application servers were affected by this downtime? It was briefly mentioned on TheServerSide.com.
My fingers have a mind of their own today. That word should be incident.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's relevant on Slashdot, as it's a blatant excuse for Microsoft bashing.
/. goes down?
I agree completely... The only thing is... where do I go to bitch when
There are plenty of sites with equal or greater degree of concurrency, that manage not to fail as often as Hotmail. Perhaps the posters nose is not in the air, and yours is stuck somewhere else less pleasant.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When Microsoft made the deal with IBM, they didn't even have an OS, but they quickly bought an OS someone else had created for $50,000 and obviously had it ready in time. Once again showing Microsoft's innovation isn't with software but rather with business deals.
I can't afford a sig!
Hotmail appears to be online again.
Allright, let's bring it down again. Really, I don't get how this made the front page of slashdot, internet servers are down often (ones running MS Windows) and Hotmail has a huge load every day. It's not suprising that it went down...
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
Actually 74 hits and 9 viruses isn't that bad all things considered.
Adaware is like some SPAM software. It points out anything that _might_ be spyware/adware. I just ran it on my system 3-4 days ago and it came up with something like 33 hits/1 virus. I looked into the issues that it brought up and none of them - not a single one - was actually spyware or adware or anything malicious.
Examples:
It pointed out a regsitry key that Windows Media Player's unique identification string. Alright, this could be considered "spyware", except that on my machine, Media Player is set up so that the unique identification is never sent out. I don't think this constitutes a risk of any kind.
A slew of hits came from registry entries for software that was not on my computer. I had installed AIM the day before to find that it now installs spyware. That doesn't really count in my opinion.
1 program was listed as a virus or something along those line (spyware, adware, worm, I don't remember), but looking into it, that program could not have worked on my system, due to my security setup. A non-issue.
I could be wrong, but you seem to be one of those people who has made a prejudgement against Windows security without knowing anything about it. I ran a 20 user (~200 users if you include web customers) Windows network (Win2K almost exclusively, but one each 98, NT, and 2K3 thrown in for good measure) that had no real firewall set up for it (nothing MS specific set up on the firewall) and had no antivirus software installed anywhere.
I designed the system so that everybody got security updates automatically, preapproved by me. Only a single workstation ever got a virus/worm/etc (actually there were multiple) during my management of the system. She installed these virii through her e-mail by opening attachments. But still, the security of the system prevented the virus from spreading to other machines.
Code Red never breached our system, Nimda tried for years, Blaster brought down the network simply due to excessive traffic on some Colo servers but never infected anything on our end. The list goes on.
I don't know why there are so many incompetent Windows administrators out there, but I wish they would all find a job better suited to themselves.
That ended up being a bit off-topic. Mod at will.
I don't think they fixed everything. Any gecko based browser crashes at some point, and I noticed that Opera doesn't even work with the service (something about cookies, and yes they're all turned on).
it was so peacefull with hotmail and msn down, i mean the users on my isp's network mostly use it for hotmail or msn, and with those down i was getting a hell of a speed :D which i availed to max.
Microsoft has had enough trouble keeping their online service working without anyone on the outside trying to bring them down. Don't believe me? Sign up for their service and when you need them the most, they won't work.
So that's why I got less spam than usual on Friday!
A recent cumulative update patch for Internet Explorer browsers removes support for the user:pass@www.site.com basic authentication method for HTTP and HTTPS URL's - a response to widespread misuse of the functionality to spoof web addresses to trick unsuspecting users into revealing personal information to a dubious third-party. However, a side effect of this patch includes intermittent clobbering of hidden form fields used to maintain state or session on sites that do not implement cookies. This will render most script driven web sites useless.. Also, installing this patch clears out and resets any internal IE cache of username and password combinations used on frequently visited sites, causing people to have to enter these details anew.
It is likely that this issue may be responsible for the recently reported Hotmail and MSN related outages (CNN) and a variety of increasing problems on many other web sites as users continue to install the update patch into their IE browser over time. A MS TechNet article describes this problem and proposes workarounds - one is to uninstall the patch, or install a new patch to fix the previous patch for users of IE 6.0 and higher. Web site operators are also encouraged to increase the server KeepAlive connection timeout, although a specific numeric suggestion isn't proposed. There is an informative thread on this topic available in the Google Groups UseNet archives. Apparently this issue has been growing more problematic over the past five weeks, and will continue to effect sites and users unless steps are taken to address it.
IMHO: An illustrative analogy to this problem would be like your automobile manufacturer determining that accidents are caused by vehicles in motion. As a solution, all tires will be removed, thereby preventing accidents. What a great cure.
I only signed up because they send a free modem instead of having to pay $50 extra for another ISP. Eventually I got Qwest.net and I haven't had any problems.
Was anyone using msn.net in Seattle and had similar troubles?
Seriously, what's the reason? Who here seriously uses Hotmail? This is a Linux site.
Things sometimes go offline for a day. Google's done it. I've been having Slashdot access problems in the past few days. Believe it or not, servers will go down for maintenance, especially high-volume places like Hotmail. It wasn't an attack or anything but simply internal maintenance and fixing.
The only reason this article got posted is so people can laugh at Microsoft. That's the *only* reason. It's pretty silly if you ask me. Next time Slashdot is down (or gets crapflooded to over 3000 posts like in the recent Intel CPU id article), should the Microsoft sites post about it and laugh?
This patch seems to screw up lots of other things. Google 832894 in their groups and you get lots of other stuff. Seems that .NET and Passport use XML to do some basic login, which the MS patch breaks. Makes me wonder how smart it is to have automatic updates for buggy patches that mess with the web standards we've had for years.
Unlike Hotmail, which still runs primarily on UNIX, Passport is entirely based on Windows servers.
Hotmail has been running on Windows servers for several years now.
I doubt they just pulled the trick of changing the ident..
Someone inside would know and it would leak...
Would be a field day on Microsoft if so.. they wouldnt take that big of a risk..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, if they would stop trying to replace their reliable FreeBSD and Solaris servers with their own "dog food", they wouldn't have this problem. Just continue with their current practice of having the visible servers running WS2003 so no one knows about the others, and Bill and Steve can sleep easily at night.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The other problem with some of the early macs that you forgot to mention was the multitasking was subpar. I remember that if you held the mouse button down to drag something or kept it down during a moment of indecision on a menu, the entire system would wait to process anything else until you to released it. Man, have Macs come a long way!
In other news not reported on slashdot, RedHat Network, the only way to get critical updates for RedHat Enterprise Linux, has been down ALL WEEKEND. Their web site says this is a planned outage, but it most certainly was not announced to paying customers who had scheduled and announced outages requiring access to RHN this weekend.
"Passport" was down from when I got to work at 8am until god knows when (I left at 5pm and it was STILL down)
This meant that I was unable to access our expensive MSDN subscription pages. I couldn't get serial numbers to complete some Office 2003 installs.
Stupid Microsoft for putting everything behind that damn "Passport" crap. Stupid me for not saying "Screw the EULA" and printing out my license keys and sticking them in a drawer. Ugh.
Even if you are Microsoft!!
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Unfortunately most of the general public uses some flavor of Internet Explorer, and if they've (Microsoft) done something to break it, then it will effect lots of sites besides their own. I hope this doesn't result in some kind of snowball that puts us all out in the cold.
-N
Hey, why didn't someone call me?
Do you have ESP?
You should never update individual servers with different configs or application revisions inside a cluster. That goes against the whole spirit of identical, redundant servers providing service.
I'll say what hopefully many others have said about this "news" item:
"Who fucking cares?"
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Nice theory, but during the problematic period, I couldn't login in to xbox.com (via passport) with Galeon. Ooops.
p.s. Apparently, as was posted in a comment elsewhere in this thread, MS Passport uses some kind of XML login scheme that relies on basic authentication, which this particlar patch has rendered inoperable, at least at present.
Interesting fact you brought out... Back in the days, MS was adamant about keeping their OS unlocked from the hardware. Now, you can't even unweld it without getting crosswise of them. F
99 servers to patch on the net, 99 servers to patch Take one down, patch it to hell 98 servers to patch on the net
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Microsoft wants people to use their PassPort for web services, so the question is, how does this affect the feasibility of that?
Who is using PassPort now? Did Microsoft notify you that your site would be down due to authentication failure? Did they give you a good estimate of when your site would be back up?
(I don't use PassPort, so I don't know, but I'm certainly curious.)
several times during the day on Fri. with no issues.
Thank you!
[and such]
[comment mod system]
[Lameness Filter addition]
In the past week I have received several different email bounce messages because a couple Hotmail users were/are spoofing my email address in their spamming.
I fully understand that MS is a huge target for ALL this junk (viruses, etc.), but Yahoo appears to police things MUCH better by making it a priority - and of course Yahoo does not have the huge software cash stream that MS has, either!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A quick note for apache admins- on our 1.3.x server, we found nokeepalive set for browsers *MSIE* by default. Removing that made a dramatic improvement for our users, possibly a complete solution (small sample size).
Its being a freebie mailbox is irrelevent. That's not what I was talking about. Besides, when MS bought out hotmail, it was back in the day when bandwidth was cheap and everything was free on the web. Remember those post-bubble days?
Hell, the only thing I use web-based emails for are throwaway spam accounts, or IM accounts. I'm not the ignorant one here, so stop the accusations.
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice