TORONTO – Service has been restored to Microsoft’s Hotmail and Outlook email accounts after an outage that started shortly after 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
According to Microsoft’s service status dashboard all of Microsoft’s services, including Hotmail and Outlook accounts, were running normally as of 10 a.m. ET Wednesday.
The long-lasting outage angered many users, who took to Twitter just after 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday complaining that they couldn’t access their email accounts. Microsoft confirmed the outage at 5:35 p.m. Tuesday and said that they were working on restoring the service.
The outage, which was not a total system blackout and only interrupted service to some users, also affected Microsoft SkyDrive and Calendar accounts, according to multiple reports.
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But it was the length of the service disruption has many users up in arms.
“After hotmail being down for over 6 hours it’s time to move to Gmail. Been putting it off for too long,” tweeted Twitter user Laurie Antonioli (@IntrinsicMusic).
Another Twitter user Michelle Magnan (@Michelle_Magnan) tweeted, “#Hotmail, don’t screw me now. I may be the only person who actually uses Hotmail, according to my buds, but I’m counting on you.”
Tech website TechCrunch even called the disruption “The Great Hotmail, Outlook Outage of 2013” in their report.
UPDATE (Thursday, March 14): Microsoft has apologized to users after a lengthy service outage to their Hotmail and Outlook email services that started Tuesday night and continued into Wednesday morning.
According to a blog post on the company’s website the outage was caused by a firmware update at one of Microsoft’s data centres.
“This is an update that had been done successfully previously, but failed in this specific instance in an unexpected way. This failure resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the datacenter,” read Microsoft’s website.
“This spike was significant enough before it was mitigated that it caused our safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacenter.”
Microsoft noted that their teams were able to restore service in waves throughout the night and the majority of inboxes were restored at 5:30 a.m. ET.
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