Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!"
The question is - how many nerds use Hotmail.com, and why does this non-event warrant a front page article?
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
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.
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
"Few short hours"? - Would you consider like 12 hours to be a few short hours?
Agreed about the data, but 12 hours for a major outlet like HM is pretty incredible.
Makes you think twice about the supposed reliability of anything MS doesn't it? If not you, than certainly me...
Anyway...
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!
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 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!
there was a delay in speech with the guy I was talking to as well
Microsoft outsourced their tech support to India?
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.)
Yes.. That terrible, evil company.. They were so wrong to give you a free email service. How dare they..
Perhaps you should find a new industry to participate in, since you are so unhappy with the way things are.
Life is too short.
Wish i had problem with spam directly, but
[clip type="hotmail-attachment"]
Received: from host13-75.pool8249.interbusiness.it (host13-75.pool8249.interbusiness.it [82.49.75.13])
by lamx02.mgw.rr.com (8.12.10/8.12.8) with SMTP id i26HS6Tu003922
for ; Sat, 6 Mar 2004 12:28:22 -0500 (EST)
Received: from hotmail.com (mx1.hotmail.com [65.54.166.99])
by host13-75.pool8249.interbusiness.it (Postfix) with ESMTP id 88860B101C
for ; Sat, 06 Mar 2004 10:30:47 -0800
From: "Denature E. Hideaways"
To: Jokerr
Subject: RE:someone special sent you a greeting an
Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 10:30:47 -0800
Message-ID:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
X-GMX-Antivirus: 0 (no virus found)
X-Virus-Scanned: Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine
[/clip]
And there are many returned 'unable to deliver messages' waiting at hotmail inbox i have nothing to do with, damit.
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.
You do know that the second Received line (from Hotmail) was forged, right? (Clues: Hotmail rarely relays email via a interbusiness.it dynamic IP. An Italian server using west coast time is odd. Adjusting for timezones the email was received an hour before it was sent.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
All I know is, if my bank, my credit cards, or any of the other reliable online services that I use were as flaky as Hotmail (or any other Microsoft owned and operated Internet service) I'd simply use an alternative, and encourage my friends to as well. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that it really isn't competent to run a major online operation. That's why I don't use Passport, Hotmail, Messenger, indeed any Microsoft service (other than Windows Update) convenient as they might be at times.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
"hard to build"
is a relative term
opening the case and removing / inserting cards is considered harder than plugging in a scsi cable
> put the jumpers in the right places
ah, you seem to have missed the irq conflicting fun and the 'this board is hardwired to use address 0x300' when 0x300 was the reserved 'development' address manufacturers were supposed to leave free but often did quite the opposite.
I'm basing my story on working in b2b computer retail from 1990ish onwards in the time before Windows when Dos 3.3 was the operating system that shipped with PCs.
The time when you were a child.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Read up to one of my previous posts. It's quite ignorant to put yourself in a position of becoming dependant upon a freebie mailbox.
Pay $100, get a domain registered for 10 years, pay a few dollars a month for someone to host your mail. This way, you have your "lifetime" email address you can take with you when your provider does something you don't agree with.
Anyone who depends on Hotmail, Yahoo, etc for their important email is not a good idea. The suckers that become dependant will learn the hard way.
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. (emphasis mine)
You mean I can attach a debugger to a running Windows kernel just like I can with UNIX kernels and look at header files and documentation to understand the data structures and run-time parameters?
Vendor-paid case studies. Lame 2001 reference: "My god, it's full of lies!"
Any IT professional that relies on a vendor-provided case study for decision making is incompetent.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
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.
Maybe because millions of people don't use free java.sun.com e-mail addresses?