Hotmail suffers morning outage

A "networking issue" on Friday locked out millions of Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail users for more than three hours, but the service has since been restored.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company first discovered the problem at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time and "fully restored" service by 9:50 a.m. The spokeswoman said no customer data was lost during the outage. She declined to offer further details about the nature of the problem.

During the outage, attempts to log in were met with a message, saying: "This server is too busy." Since the Hotmail home page did appear, the company had advised customers to try logging in again.

The issue was the latest instance in which glitches rendered Hotmail inaccessible. In March, sign-in problems prevented Hotmail users from accessing their accounts, leading some to speculate that the issue stemmed from Microsoft's Passport authentication software.

The company says Hotmail is the world's most popular Web e-mail service, boasting more than 145 million active users, as of January.

Lucky Me

I can still access my email account at Hotmail :) May be it only affected certain users

Okay Okay, Calm Down

Server's do need maintance you know.. Microsoft is doing an upgrade or something of that sort and hopefully be online asap :)

[nmanihar]

Working for me

It worked for me all morning...

[jeff_j_black]

No prob here all morning...

Been on since 6am MST, now 9am still know issue. Is this just a pile on Microsoft kind of thing? Sure I have seen 'server to busy' on a few occasions, but never really much of a delay getting in. Serving 145 million email users for free and only down on a few occassions for brief intervals, sounds like a testament to their technology, not a knock. Did Google put you guys up to this article?

This happens all the time

Although Hotmail has been working for me today, I've seen this "server is too busy" lots of times in the past. It is difficult to complain though, considering it is free. I cannot wait to switch to Gmail, hopefully their reliability will be better.

[jtcross]

Jumping the Gun?

Seems to me you guys jumped the gun a little on this one. I haven't had any problems with it all day. Sometimes servers need a little tweaking, and sometimes servers are just plain busy. Either way it doesn't strike me as a good journalism practice to report something which has numerous explanations prior to investigating all the possibilities.

Microsoft Rocks

Jennifer I think you had a good point there :) Microsoft and Hotmail Both Rocks!

[cwaters]

No problem here, either

Working fine for me, too, since 8am (Eastern).

[avfolk--2008]

Longhorn beta???

Maybe they were just testing an advance copy of Longhorn.

If Bush really wants to find weapons of mass destruction -- he
should install ANY Micro$oft product, sit back and wait....