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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 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!
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!
You think that's bad? Try working at an isp and have people yelling at you and blaming you for breaking hotmail ;).
ahh the joys of the internet.
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
Actually many... Nerds use Hotmail for junk email accounts, like when they want to download something that needs registering first but don't want to receive the newsletter junks.
I use it. They offer the best service as far as I can tell but I hate that they go down as often as they do. The one feature that keeps me with hotmail is the shell extension that tells you when you have mail. I have to use windows at work, I need web mail and I don't want to go check to see if I've got mail.
I seriously didn't know Hotmail was down. I had users asking me why it was down and I thought it may have been our connection. It's actually of some relief to know it was a technical problem on Microsoft's end... and I would not have found out about it if not for Slashdot...
So it's not necessarily a "petty" thing as a "nice to know" thing... like all other slashdot stories... you are within your rights to refrain from reading the articles... no need to get grouchy if an article doesn't suit your taste. JUST DON'T READ IT! =P
Addbo
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.
It is a great account for your junk mail! Then again so is Yahoo... but hotmail was the first I believe =)
It is also my first email account (got it in 96) and so now people can still contact me after I've moved around the world.
When a service like Hotmail and MSN go down for a few hours it affects ALOT (millions) of people... nerd included... why shouldn't it be on the frontpage? I know I was interested enough to click on the articles (though I agree they are sparse on details)
Addbo
What web based email account do you use.
Hotmail
Yahoo
Lycos
Mailinator
Telepathy
CowboyNeal's
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.
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).
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?
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.
It's odd this outage lasted for so many hours. Hotmail is spread across multiple clusters at multiple geographic locations. Presumably, so is passport (which is what was br0xx0red). You would *think* MS would keep a complete backup of the last known passport config somewhere, like 1 day - 1 week, etc.
In theory it should only take a matter of minutes to rollback the entire thing... and you would've thought they'd test it before deploying any changes.
Sounds like somebody screwed the pooch on this one.
Being a cluster you would think they'd be upgrading them one server at a time, and they'd pretty quickly notice that the first server they tried to upgrade wasn't working. They could just take that one server out of the cluster until it was fixed.
:)
They proabably rolled a change out to all servers via SMS (not the text messaging protocol) and couldn't back it out
It's not free. It's ad-supported, meant to make them money. It's MS' aim to draw people in so they can suck money from them. If they want to make money, they could provide a better service, namely one that people are willing to use. What would you say if the provider of your primary email account, something you've come to rely upon, was bought out by $MULTINATIONAL_CORP and you started getting 5 megs of spam email a day?
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice
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.
Yes, "Customers" were affected. There are plenty of people who pay for extra storage on Hotmail. Also, Windows Messenger is a part of XP, which people pay for, so it is a service that they PAID for.
Last, but by no means least, anyone who uses other Passport authenticated services, like MSDN (Costs over $2K a year, I have it) was unable to connect. Considering that many of those services are the very ones that people need to prep for deployment of XP SP2, which I would wager a lot of organizations were planning on testing and/or deploying this weekend, having the tech resources needed to properly configure and evaluate that deployment off-line presents a major problem.
Your assertion that no-one of consequence, or who paid for a service, was harmed is complete BS. It simply indicates that you have no idea what else Passport authenticates, or maybe even how Hotmail works.
So last week java.sun.com was down for three full days and nothing (even though I submitted a story). Now hotmail goes down for 4 hours we get a story on the front page. Wow.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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!