Hotmail outage affects millions

Microsoft's e-mail service was shut down briefly today, as well as the company's Live Messenger server. According to a blog posting from Microsoft representative Arthur De Haan, not every user was affected, but there was a server failure.

"Windows Live ID logins were failing for some customers, and this increased the load on our remaining servers. We took the problematic server offline and brought a new server into rotation. We identified the root cause and fixed it in less than an hour, but it took a while to resolve the logjam that had built up in the meantime, and to redistribute the load to normal levels," wrote De Haan.

Since integrating its Live platform across all of Microsoft's services, there are now over 300 million users with a Live ID. However, even before the huge online ID integration, Hotmail is no stranger to systemwide outages. Numerous times over the past few years, the e-mail service has been shut down due to technical issues.

A recent report from Hitwise showed that Hotmail has less than 2% of the e-mail market share in the US.

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