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.
@John The Microsoft bashing is NOT ridiculous. Something as widely and globally used as Live logins* should NOT be centralized in a single location. Microsoft has lots of data centers.. either 1) they had a software crapout at every center (the "failed upgrade" theory). 2) The failover software crapped out. 3) They don't have enough capacity, so one data center failed, failover worked, but the remaining infrastructure instead of slowing down under load completely crapped out.** 4) They really are ignoring best practices for something of that scale and running it out of a single data center, which failed.
Any of those 4 is deserving of severe bashing.
*Not used by me though. I just don't trust Microsoft enough to give them any credentials.
**IIS used to be infamous for this.. Apache on Linux would gradually slow down as more load was placed on it.. whereas IIS on Windows' response time would stay level up to a certain load (part of this level part was actually faster than Apache..) then past a certain load it'd rapidly increase, so rapidly that 5-10% extra load would make it totally unresponsive. To me this would seem to make capacity planning a bit of a trick!
Try run this as a SQL 05 script and you will see what I mean if you have a field with some Null values
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE Not FIELD = Null
now take out the NOT bit.
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE FIELD = Null
There you have your awnser... nothing works as per standard.
hotmail down... I could only wonder why.
Paris says to try fixing the half written code first before migrating.
Jeff said:
"Why criticise other people for using Microsoft products? They're not causing you Linux/Mac fan boys any bother are they?"
Well actually their crappy products do cause other people bother (a NetBSD fanboy in this case, not that I'd expect you to know what that is). Enormous networks of compromised Windows PCs, thamks to MicroSofts inability to produce competent software, perform scans of my servers and try to send me malware or spam. all day, every day.
"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."
Tukwila. No c, one l. And FWIW, my network connection goes from southern Seattle to Tukwila to Sunnydale, with no downtown Seattle stop.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely can't stand Microsoft but.... how much are (most of?) the users paying for hotmail and msn messenger etc? Nothing? In that case I don't think it is fair to complain. Outages happen to all companies at some time or another. Of course, I suppose they make their money from advertising, but basically it is a free service.
That said, I can't wait till Microsoft fails. Open source is the future. Openoffice, Ubuntu, etc, they're not just "alternatives" anymore. They are the way forward. Combined with open document formats, I can't see any reason to keep using Office especially. Windows Vista, well I think it's agreed that there is no obvious reason to be using that either. If you haven't made the switch yet, now is the time, believe me!
Hotmail may be shite. Yahoo may be shite. Gmail may be shite (and definitely IS intrusive).
These, and many other webmail offers, are FREE. Users should expect the level of service that implies. In fact (at least in terms of total outage) the level of service exceeds what could be reasonably expected.
It is foolish to rely entirely on a single free service for anything critical. Spread your bets, people!
If you want quality and reliability, expect to pay for it. But if you pay peanuts, expect monkeys.
I've been using hotmail since it was first released last century. This is the first significant outage I've seen.
Give the guys credit for what they've achieved so far. It's a credit to them that the system is available worldwide 24x7 over many years, almost without interruption. How many of your corporate networks could manage that?
There's no justification MS bashing over this.
& remember - you don't pay for it.
I've been with Hotmail for many years too (not exclusively, I hasten to add, purely because of such problems). You're talking rubbish if you think that Hotmail has been up 24/7 for years before this. I'm not saying they don't do a good job, but I can think of at least three incidents that were notable enough for me to switch email accounts for the day/week.
A quick Google turns up an event like this about once a year since they started. Quick, random, not especially notable example:
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2006/11/16/hot-mail.html
In fact, I can even list at least three MS websites that let you log into Hotmail and use different servers - quite often, as was the case this time round, you can't get into one but you can get into others. Hotmail.com, hotmail.co.uk, hotmail.msn.com (that last one is the critical one - if that's done, it tends to be ALL of Hotmail down).
All due, having Hotmail up is a hard task that is done remarkably well, but they aren't any more infallible than other hosting companies. The only email provider that I haven't experienced any downtime on is Gmail so far but I was late to that and I don't log into it all that often, which is, I suspect, the case with yourself and Hotmail.
All day yesterday for me (in the USA) the gmail login didn't work, just put you back at the log in. Log in wrong and it told you, log in right and you got the log in screen again. Clicking on the mail icon in googletalk opened up gmail fine,but a log out and re-login continued to fail. Works today.
Coincidence? I don't think so.
It was OK for me when I tried it at lunchtime, and still seems to be working.
Oh, and the reason I use Hotmail? Well, it's the email address I give for signing up to things and for giving to people I don't know. In other words, I just know it's going to get spam, and there might be a fair number of emails going backwards and forwards for eBay and stuff. It's a free account, so someone else is paying for it. So ask yourself the question: who would you like to impose a financial penalty on? Me, I'm with the EC on this one. :-)
The icon? It's from that classic film, "Rosemary's Ballmer".
it took them to finally decide to reboot the laptop the whole thing runs on?
probably couldn't remember which cupboard in Seattle it is stored in.....................
/puts on Frasiers overcoat
Steve cos I would love to see him dance on stage and say how much he love's this company now!
I still get the following error message when attempting to access hotmail:
_________________________
Login Error
Windows Live Hotmail wasn't able to complete this request because your account is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.
_________________________
Yes, I have tried repeatedly the usual clearing of cookies etc.
Note that I can login to Windows Live and access my setting and payment options etc. I can also access MS Messenger.
Just not my Hotmail accout!
This started Tuesday and its still happening today. From
different computers even.
I am a long term paying customer and this is pissing me off!
3 days is way too long even if a system completely failed and they needed to recover from backup, it should be back up in a few hours.
What's the deal?
DW
@Steve
No mate, If it was a Joke it would start... A man walks into a Bar... ;)
@Jeff
I don't need to bash Micro$oft, they do a better job than I could ever do. Was it not they who did a comparison on MSSQL vs. a DB running on Unix where they used a crap unix box against a state of the art Windows box and only got 15% gains? and then got the advert pulled by Traiding Standards? Gotta love the Spin...
@Anon
I spotted that... No poo telly for me... :(
@All at Microsoft
Well done, Keep up the good work, what are you going to do next?
Waiting in wonder
A Nermal
If this is normality you can have it. I'm a nermal.
United Nations Leaders today welcomed Morpho, the egg headed alien from Pluto who emerged from his Spaceship to greet Earthpeople for the first time.
Morpho said, 'We of the United Federation of Planets greet you in the name of Galactic peace, friendship and co-operation'
The UN leaders cheered loudly.
'By the way, can you get our hotmail to work? We think it sucks'
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