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."

Comments

Date in the story?

[Klerck]

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.

Re:News for nerds?

[cioxx]

For those things there is Mailinator.

Throwaway accounts should never be, out of all places, registered on Hotmail.com. They suspend your account if you don't login for 30 days. At least Yahoo!Mail or other free alternatives let you forget the account for few months and not get penalized for it.

Re:Looks like "Passport" problems

[sl956]

Bingo!

Here is today error message for my hotmail account:

The .NET Passport service is currently unavailable at this Web site for one of these reasons:

• The site may contain an error or be experiencing a problem that affects the .NET Passport service.
• The site may not be an official .NET Passport-participating site.

It was worst on Friday though: there was not even an error message as loginnet.passport.com was either dead or unreachable.

This was NOT a Hotmail outage (as such)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Well it just figures

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Actually, MS use UNIX servers for Hotmail

Ummm... no. You have no idea what you're talking about. If you had said "used" (as in past tense), then you'd at least be close. Still wrong, but close. They used one of the BSD's until people called them on it. Hell, for all we know, they still are and just changed the headers that the server hands out to look like a MS box like the other post in this thread shows.

Anyway, you're wrong on all accounts.