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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 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
Luckily I don't use Hotmail (or any other Microsoft product).
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.
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.