Hotmail dies on both sides of the Atlantic According to Reg readers on both sides of the Atlantic, Microsoft Hotmail and other parts of MSN are on the fritz. Two readers in the UK and one in the US shot us emails early in the California am, complaining that Steve Ballmer and company have lost control of their servers. "Has the rest of the world world noticed that …
Windows Live Mobile OK , East Coast US. Just checked it and sync'd it. I wonder if it's the sites or something DNS. Probably some routing changes working their way across the internet.
As to who would use it: I got it before MS bought the company, and have had the same email address since 1993. Need I say more?
@Sam
Hotmail was originally running on BSD and Unix platforms and was *the* free non-ISP email account to have. I don't know if MS ever got it all running on Windows.
I've been using Hotmail since before Microsoft purchased it. I slowly weened myself off of it after that. Tried Yahoo!'s free webmail but didn't like it much.
Once GMail came along (and I wrangled an invite), I jumped from Hotmail completely. I keep the Hotmail account so I have a Live ID for some Microsoft website functions that require it.
* Paris Hilton icon because she really likes Hot Males (I could not avoid such a juicy pun, sorry).
a mighty offer was made, and the bottomless wallet opened,
and Hotmail was swallowed up by the Redmond whale,
and the FreeBSD Daemon was banished forthwith,
and Windows 2000 flowered in its place,
and BillG looked upon his work,
and saw that it was good.
...
and so it was,
slower and flakier and less usable,
until the service went down (yet again),
and the sun became as black as sack cloth,
and the moon became as blood,
and the seas boiled,
and the skies fell:
Server 2008 OCP Release Hotmail Migration Pilot Day.
...to those poor, misguided fools using hotmail but this is funny ;) Not often do we get to smile at the works of the black hats, either that or flicking the big 'standards compliant' switch at MSHQ has had some nasty side effects.
Don't know if you can set adds for articles but if 'buy server 2008' had come up I would have pissed myself.
cheers
I wondered how long it would take someone to complain about hotmail.
Why do so many people complain about Microsoft products?
If you don't like it don't use it. Why criticise other people for using Microsoft products? They're not causing you Linux/Mac fan boys any bother are they?
May the people that don't like the Microsoft products are just p****d because they don't know how to use them properly.
I said my piece.
Erm, if you're trying to fix the problem probably the first thing you'd do is kill the webserver (port 80) while your doing it. Much as I don't trust windoze webservers I doubt the webservers of several hundred hotmail servers all croaked simultaneously.
Roger Heathcote
Thank you for this article... especially quoting the guy who said hasnt the rest of the world noticed this... It has been over 4 hours since I first noticed the problem and MSN doesnt even have a notice about this on their site. You'd think they'd be the first with the scoop!!!
(For not hotmail users, MSn is one way you can access hotmail.) And dont even get me started that thee is no real outlet for info at MSN, or Microsoft. Any help or technical support is replied to "within 24 hours" via email!
The microsoft bashing is rediculous. This article only touches the surface. Yes, Hotmail was down, but so was a crapload of other stuff. Here in the Seattle area there was an outage from one of the major service providers. Knowing a little about the network infrastructure in the area helps too. Seattle is pretty much the northwest hub for the US. So even if there are servers in Tuckwilla, south of Seattle, they still go through the major COs in downtown for their worldwide connectivity.
And NO, I don't work for MS.
paris, because she is clueless too.
Hotmail was originally a set of Solaris backend data servers (about one per 2M users) and a set of 16 PCs per backend server running BSD/Apache which communicated with the backends via XFS. Cisco hardware glued together these units into one site cluster.
Microsoft converted the system over to its own software around 2001, partly to save costs but mostly as a demonstration and learning experience for their own scalable software solutions. It was certainly an education, and some of the first attempts had trouble.
Hotmail has worked well generally, but I've noticed increasing oddities after the "live.com" business took over. I'm guessing that a group of mediocre people have gradually inherited this project and they need to clean house a bit.
Success ! got in via live messenger,----not secure though as l didnt have to sign in. Phew! l was beginning to think it was a prelude to an American invasion! Told the guy next door----- he says its my own fault for using Hotmail. He is coming round tomorrow to show me how to set up e-mail with another provider . Damm now l have to go out and buy some beers.
I hear your call, but don't get the message.
"University of Cardiff and University of West of England, Bristol are affected to my knowledge". I wouldn't want my kids to get their education there; shark-infested waters? Google offers a great, free, hosting of e-mail accounts for the academia, btw.
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