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MS Hotmail Offline For Hours

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the trustworthy-computing dept.

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."

8 of 443 comments (clear)

  1. This is news??? Who the fuck cares! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!"

    1. Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! by xxx_Birdman_xxx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It might seem petty, but the reality is that there is a huge number of people that use hotmail on a regular basis.. this kind of downage affects a lot of people.

      What is interesting is how:
      - Microsoft responds, their press releases etc.
      - Possible reasons for failure
      - What others can learn from these kind of failures, to prevent them happening.
      - That such a large system that must deal with a massive number of requests has completely gone down instead of the service degrading due to servers failing, etc..

      Lighten up a bit, i'm honestly suprised it would go down for a significant amount of time.

      --
      Live in your skin. Keep changing the scenery.
    2. Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! by Vancorps · · Score: 4, Insightful
      An outage like this is not caused by a server failure but a misconfiguration. If it were bad hardware it would have been replaced, but that wouldn't have effected the whole cluster now would it? It also wouldn't have effected multiple services.

      Nope this problem is a central database problem, probably they tried to normalize the passport database, screw the pooch and had to roll everything back which is why it took so long.

      Or maybe they changed a permission and spend the whole day figuring out which one did it.
    3. Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! by CryBaby · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Allowing a system as large as Hotmail to completely fail is a MAJOR technical screw-up. It would be an interesting and embarrassing story no matter what OS it's running or who is in charge of it. Especially from a sysadmin point of view, it's a big deal. While it's obviously not important to you, it's anything but trivial.

      It makes me smile that it never went down when it was running on FreeBSD (shameless advocacy), although, to be fair, this incident was almost certainly due to an architectural weakness or network hardware failure and not an OS issue. I guess we'll never know...

  2. Lets get this straight by AvengerXP · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  3. Re:Predictable by jwgoerlich · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  4. invasive Microsoft feature poor market domination by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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:

    1. Microsoft: assessed: .. 80% on dominance, .. 10% luck, .. and 10% on product features
    - 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!

  5. Check those gift-horse teeth.. by k98sven · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.