MS Hotmail Offline For Hours 443
chalker writes "According to CNN, and others, the Hotmail online e-mail service, operated by Microsoft, was down for most of the working day on Friday, affecting 'a significant portion of MS customers.' People are also having trouble accessing products such as the MSN Messenger instant messaging program. The company said it was an internal problem rather than an attack on its system and that it hoped to have service restored by 5:30 p.m. PST. As of 8:15 PM EST, Hotmail appears to be online again."
Date in the story? (Score:5, Informative)
This story isn't even relevant at this point.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Informative)
Throwaway accounts should never be, out of all places, registered on Hotmail.com. They suspend your account if you don't login for 30 days. At least Yahoo!Mail or other free alternatives let you forget the account for few months and not get penalized for it.
Re:Well it WAS working until you /.'ed it. (Score:2, Informative)
No text, i.e., the subject _is_ the whole message.
Re:Looks like "Passport" problems (Score:5, Informative)
Here is today error message for my hotmail account: It was worst on Friday though: there was not even an error message as loginnet.passport.com was either dead or unreachable.
Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! (Score:3, Informative)
The same goes for any service. Not just MS.
Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm jharper@hotmail.com (I'm not afraid of posting the address publicly, i think i'm on every mailing list I could be on anyway
So if I used the account seriously, rather than just as an address I can hand out if I need to hand one out, i'd need the extra space to hold all the spam that built up overnight.
Re:Stop the presses! (Score:4, Informative)
And your ignorance of news is blinding you to the fact that all the other major news sites reported hotmail and msns outages as well.
Even CNN had it as a top story in the technology section.
Re:Redundancy anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I'll say... (Score:3, Informative)
Fortunately I escaped from supporting the end-user general public several years ago, but it was many years earlier that Hotmail stopped working for me. As I recall, it was shortly after Hotmail was purchased by MS that my entire mail quota could be filled with spam in mere days, and it was then that the system got so sluggish and unreliable that it was never a surprise when I couldn't use it. (Microsoft is really good at some things, not least among them making people feel like pawns in billion dollar chess games.)
There really was a time when I both used and liked Hotmail. I think that time was 1997.
But as you point out in your post, the innocence of those simpler days is still alive, like a proverbial chest-burster from Alien, in the hearts of many Internet users.
Re:Lets get this straight (Score:2, Informative)
Now Novell's our friend, why not use MyRealBox [myrealbox.com] instead of Hotmail?
Junk accounts (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dammit (Score:5, Informative)
perceived levels of freedom
Back in the day, both IBM PCs and Apple Macs were closed systems, their internel workings were undocumented to the outside world. There was, however, one crucial difference. PCs set up the hardware with the BIOS and then went to disk for the OS whereas MACs booted from an internal ROM. Compaq succeeded in cloning the IBM BIOS which meant you could put an IBM floppy in a Compaq machine and it would boot. Some companies tried to clone the Mac but were slapped with lawsuits because you couldn't copy the Apple ROM. The company that supplied IBM with the stuff on their floppies was a Washington startup called Microsoft who had cunningly retained the right to ship MS-DOS seperate from a computer.
Consequently the PC Clone market flourished and IBM lost their control over the PC Platform driving down price while driving up incompatibility. Meanwhile Apple continued to develop their platform. It was a technically superior platform with a unified graphical user interface, used Postscript for printing and SCSI for devices. This made MACs expensive when you did CPU Cycles / $. You could walk into an Apple dealer, choose the bits, go home, plug it all together and it worked whereas you would go to a PC dealer tell him what you want and he's spend a few days building it and battling to get the bits talking to each other but when you got it home it worked.
Because it was difficult to build and maintain PCs, their builders and maintainers looked down on the MAC, it wasn't as fast for the same $, was too easy to use, you didn't have to take the case to pieces to add a peripheral and the only people you knew who had them were too rich to deserve them.
As the builders and maintainers of the PCs of everyone in their social circle, the non-techies trusted the techies opinion, parroting the same lame arguments in PCs vs MACs arguments the world over.
Re:Well it just figures (Score:0, Informative)
Third of Nine
Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! (Score:4, Informative)
They're trying to prove to the world that Microsoft is incompetent and evil. Those of us that use Windows must all be real morons who don't know shit, so they're hoping that by pointing out that Steve Ballmer double-parked we'll finally "see the light!" It wouldn't bother me except that it is generally assumed that my choice to use Windows 2000 wasn't voluntary. Slashbots think that Microsoft's monopoly put a Windows box on my desk at both home and at work. Yeah, there might be some truth to it. But seriously, if Windows was the big lump of shit that the people stuck in the past imagine it to be, I wouldn't be able to do 3D rendering on it.
I agree with you that the petty "anything that can be spun against Microsoft" campaign is childish and obnoxious, but in this case, it was nice to find out why Hotmail was down. It's also nice to know when the next big worm breaks. Slashdot's helped me stay protected for years now.
I just hope one day Slashdot will take Microsoft a little more seriously instead of the righetous BS that I need to be running Linux even though my work software isn't running on it.
*sigh* This post isn't going to be visible for very long. Pity. At least it felt good to let it out.
Re:Dammit (Score:0, Informative)
For fuck's sake. It's "Mac," not "MAC."
Let's do both! (Score:2, Informative)
Routing to Slashdot occasionally has problems passing through Clueless & Witless space, but that's normal.
Re:Well it just figures (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yeah, I'll say... (Score:2, Informative)
There was a two part article in Delphi Informant (Jan-Feb) on creating a proxy server using SMTP/POP and WebDAV to talk to Hotmail from any email program. (Their WebDAV interface is undocumented, but they can't change it too much without breaking Outlook.)
This was NOT a Hotmail outage (as such) (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike Hotmail, which still runs primarily on UNIX, Passport is entirely based on Windows servers.
Passport is the authentication / single sign-on system for all these MSN services. If it's down, everything's down. And sadly it has proven a little unreliable recently, for reasons never disclosed.
Re:Well it just figures (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... no. You have no idea what you're talking about. If you had said "used" (as in past tense), then you'd at least be close. Still wrong, but close. They used one of the BSD's until people called them on it. Hell, for all we know, they still are and just changed the headers that the server hands out to look like a MS box like the other post in this thread shows.
Anyway, you're wrong on all accounts.
Re:Lets get this straight (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dammit (Score:5, Informative)
Building a computer from parts might be easy for you, but that does not make it "easy". Most people can't handle it. They want to buy a computer and take it out of the box and plug it in and turn it on. This goes for PCs or Macs.
Have you used a Mac that was manufactured in the past half decade? You can use any USB mouse with them, including your seven-buttons-with-scroll-wheel optical mouse. They use PCI, AGP, ATA, and USB for expansion. They have a "taskbar", it's called the Dock.
Windows's popularity is entirely attributable to Worse is Better [jwz.org].
Not only Hotmail... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dammit (Score:5, Informative)
Apple was very innovative, but made a number of large mistakes that really hurt them in the market. While software for the IBM PC focused on business applications (DBASE and Lotus), the Mac focused on paint programs. It is no surprise that today artists still like Macs.
Apple made some very questionable hardware decisions. They made the original Mac non expandable (no slots, you even needed a special tool to open the case, didn't change until the Mac II), even though expansion was a key to the Apple II's success (they totally ignored their hacker roots). They did thing like use a self ejecting floppy drive, which was patented by Sony and drove up the price. They had a one button mouse and a keyboard where a lot of keys were unsupported (including the forward delete key). They made their own networking hardware (localtalk) which although cheaper was slow, and had connectors which were non-locking (causing endless technical support problems).
Sure, you could go into a store and by Mac bits, and they would all work, but that is because they had a lock on the hardware and the software. The Mac has had its share of low level problems and incompatibilities. Some of the famous ones include a bad virtual memory implementation (which was so bad most users turned it off) and 28 bit vs. 32 bit addressing (it broke a lot of badly written software so there was a switch to turn it off). Imagine using a machine where you had no virutal memory, and running out of memory becuase you opened and closed programs in a certain order.
In the beginning (pre 1995), Apple had a better operating system than Windows. They innovated the GUI, and they had technical advantages, such as things like a flat address space. But Windows caught up and overtook the Macintosh, both in terms of user interface and developer tools. Before OS 10, the mac was still mostly 68k assembly, and was very difficult to program and debug on. Also, until OS 10 there was no protected memory, meaning it was easy for one badley behaved program to take down the system.
When Apple moved to the Power PC in about 1995, instead of porting their operating system, they ran most of it in emulation. Which ment slower speeds and more difficult debugging for developers.
While Apple patched and limped along, Microsoft built Windows NT from the ground up, written mostly in C (so it was portable). While previous Microsoft operating systems were more like the Mac, NT had protected memory and preemptive multitasking, two features that are critical to a modern, stable operating system.
So while Apple had the early lead, they had a wealth of technical problems and poor hardware choices which hurt their platform.
Microsoft IE Patch KB832894 - Could Wreck the Web (Score:4, Informative)
A recent cumulative update patch for Internet Explorer browsers removes support for the user:pass@www.site.com basic authentication method for HTTP and HTTPS URL's - a response to widespread misuse of the functionality to spoof web addresses to trick unsuspecting users into revealing personal information to a dubious third-party. However, a side effect of this patch includes intermittent clobbering of hidden form fields used to maintain state or session on sites that do not implement cookies. This will render most script driven web sites useless.. Also, installing this patch clears out and resets any internal IE cache of username and password combinations used on frequently visited sites, causing people to have to enter these details anew.
It is likely that this issue may be responsible for the recently reported Hotmail and MSN related outages (CNN [cnn.com]) and a variety of increasing problems on many other web sites as users continue to install the update patch into their IE browser over time. A MS TechNet [microsoft.com] article describes this problem and proposes workarounds - one is to uninstall the patch, or install a new patch to fix the previous patch for users of IE 6.0 and higher. Web site operators are also encouraged to increase the server KeepAlive connection timeout, although a specific numeric suggestion isn't proposed. There is an informative thread on this topic available in the Google Groups [google.com] UseNet archives. Apparently this issue has been growing more problematic over the past five weeks, and will continue to effect sites and users unless steps are taken to address it.
IMHO: An illustrative analogy to this problem would be like your automobile manufacturer determining that accidents are caused by vehicles in motion. As a solution, all tires will be removed, thereby preventing accidents. What a great cure.
Re:Dammit (Score:2, Informative)
No, actually the IBM Technical Reference Manuals for available, and not only documented all the circuitry, but also the BIOS. It was all copyrighted, but not 'undocumented'.
The actual difference had more to do with that IBM chose to use a documented bus, the ISA, and encouraged others to manufacture add-on hardware. While Apple strongly discouraged add-on hardware.
RedHat Network offline for days, unannounced (Score:2, Informative)