Microsoft Blames Hotmail and Outlook Outage on Overheating Servers

Tuesday’s outage of Hotmail, SkyDrive and Outlook services cheesed a lot of people off. Microsoft has apologised for the outage already and after a “mini-investigation” Microsoft has discovered that the cause of the outage was overheating at one of its Data-Centres which hosts the key Microsoft services.

Microsoft stated that on March the 12th at 3:35PM PDT its service was disrupted by a spike in temperatures in the DataCentre, the jump in heat occurred during regular firmware updates but they failed to work properly this time in an unexpected way. Automated safeguards kicked in which restricted the outage to that part of the infrastructure affecting Hotmail, Outlook and SkyDrive.

Microsoft said the problem required human intervention to fix, hence why the outage lasted over 12 hours. This incident adds to the poor reputation of Microsoft’s Hotmail service which has been plagued by widespread spam problems, spam filter problems and account hacking. We suspect this event could have triggered a further mass-migration to alternative mail services like Gmail representing the final nail in the coffin for many aggravated users.

Microsoft brought out Outlook as a fresh new version of Hotmail that allowed it to drop the tarnished name but since both services were affected by the same problem, damage has already been done to this new service which Microsoft officially launched only a few weeks ago.

Microsoft has officially apologised for the incident and said it takes outages very seriously but is that enough? Have you decided to move after the outage? Have you moved from Hotmail to Gmail in the past? Do you think Outlook provides a competitive service? Let us know what you think!

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