MS Hotmail Offline For Hours

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."

This is news??? Who the fuck cares!

[Anonymous Coward]

God, how fucking petty is slashdot getting???

Sure, hotmail was down, boo-hoo. It's a free email service. Deal with it.

Why is slashdot determined to report every single trivial detail when it comes to Microsoft? Try to stick with the big stories, please, not "Bill Gates forgets to lift toilet seat!" or "Steve Ballmer takes up two parking spaces in Microsoft parking lot!"

News for nerds?

[cioxx]

The question is - how many nerds use Hotmail.com, and why does this non-event warrant a front page article?

Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares!

[xxx_Birdman_xxx]

It might seem petty, but the reality is that there is a huge number of people that use hotmail on a regular basis.. this kind of downage affects a lot of people.

What is interesting is how:
- Microsoft responds, their press releases etc.
- Possible reasons for failure
- What others can learn from these kind of failures, to prevent them happening.
- That such a large system that must deal with a massive number of requests has completely gone down instead of the service degrading due to servers failing, etc..

Lighten up a bit, i'm honestly suprised it would go down for a significant amount of time.

Re:News for nerds?

[killyourblender]

Sadly enough, considering how many millions of people are dependant on Microsoft's email system, granted I'm sure we all know at least one person who uses their hotmail account on a regular basis. All the same, an impact like that has a larger effect on the world as a whole by canceling out a major piece of the world's communication for a whole day. e.g. - you may not like carrots, but if your girlfriend is a vegetarian who eats carrots like mad and a plague wiped out the nation's carrot crop, she'd be pretty bummed out and not want to come visit tonight because she didn't get her dose of vitamins from the carrot.

Cool!!!! Three day old news!

[mrshowtime]

There should be a TOPIC/STORY negative modifier for old news, or news that is blatantly obvious. Or just have "FARK" tags. If this "story" about how hotmail was down ran on Fark, it would have the "obvious" tag.

Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares!

[Vancorps]

An outage like this is not caused by a server failure but a misconfiguration. If it were bad hardware it would have been replaced, but that wouldn't have effected the whole cluster now would it? It also wouldn't have effected multiple services.

Nope this problem is a central database problem, probably they tried to normalize the passport database, screw the pooch and had to roll everything back which is why it took so long.

Or maybe they changed a permission and spend the whole day figuring out which one did it.

Stop the presses!

[kiwioddBall]

A website went down but is back up again!!!

Just because a Microsoft website goes down it is front page news. Seriously slashdot, your Linux loving policy is blinding you as to what is relevant and what isn't.

Re:Single point of failure

[Anonymous Coward]

At any rate, just because its one password in no way means you can't have a cluster of 5000 servers all storing and accepting transactions for it. I'd hardly call passport servers in Russia, the U.S., Germany, England, China, Japan etc... a single point of failure.

Sadly that last downtime proves you wrong: hotmail's passport was down not only from the U.S. but also from Germany and England. I've not tested those alleged russian and chinese servers but it seems that a single misconfiguration has taken down all those 5000 servers. That's exactly what I would call a single point of failure.

Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares!

[CryBaby]

Allowing a system as large as Hotmail to completely fail is a MAJOR technical screw-up. It would be an interesting and embarrassing story no matter what OS it's running or who is in charge of it. Especially from a sysadmin point of view, it's a big deal. While it's obviously not important to you, it's anything but trivial.

It makes me smile that it never went down when it was running on FreeBSD (shameless advocacy), although, to be fair, this incident was almost certainly due to an architectural weakness or network hardware failure and not an OS issue. I guess we'll never know...

its proof centralisation is bad

[auzy]

Microsoft basically wants to centralise everything in the future in longhorn.. And this pretty much proves that while it might be good for them, that major problems will arise.

.. For instance, Networks like MSN messenger are completely centralised.. Sure MS has full control over it, but unlike decentralised networks like jabber, if one server goes down, the entire network doesn't..

I'm hoping consumers learn from this and learn about the importance of decentralisation, and from now on make choices taking into account decentralisation too..

sorry, just thought this thread needed someone to expand on this little event

Re:News for nerds?

[Tony-A]

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.

Isn't that the idea of a throwaway account?

Re:Date in the story?

[GSloop]

"Few short hours"? - Would you consider like 12 hours to be a few short hours?

Agreed about the data, but 12 hours for a major outlet like HM is pretty incredible.

Makes you think twice about the supposed reliability of anything MS doesn't it? If not you, than certainly me...

Anyway...

Lets get this straight

[AvengerXP]

No "customers" were harmed. The only people who use Hotmail are people who are too poor/lazy to install their own ISP's mail system on their machines.

And if you base your business on Hotmail, i'd say you have a serious I.T. decisions problem.

Re:Lets get this straight

[1s44c]

And if you base your business on Hotmail, i'd say you have a serious I.T. decisions problem.

I'd totally agree. But it doesn't change the fact that a very large number of small businesses do use hotmail email addresses. I can walk down any highstreet near where I live and see hotmail addresses on shop windows and the side of vans.

Hotmail has become the choice for people that know nothing about IT and just want something simple that works.

The guy is right

[0x0d0a]

I hate to say it, but websites do go down. It's regrettable, but the reasons people here dislike Microsoft are not because they have a website that happened to go down. Blame Microsoft for their real flaws.

Heck, if the FOSS world was held accountable for, say, Sourceforge or Slashdot reliability, we'd all be in a world of hurt.

Re:Lets get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they even know a little about IT!
Like: don't use an ISP mail address, as next year there may be an attractive offer from a competing ISP and you might not want to be locked-in by a mail address that is tied to one ISP.

Using a generic address like @hotmail.com is one step between using an ISP address and registering your own domain.

Re:Predictable

[jwgoerlich]

it would make more sense when Microsoft would claim it was an attack. Internal problems can be blaimed on the company ...

With Win2000, Microsoft was working hard to get away from their reputation for instability. Some of this they fixed with software changes, and some with marketing propaganda.

With Longhorn, Microsoft is working twice as hard to get away from their rep for insecurity. At least for the moment, it is better to have their systems appear a tad unstable than insecure.

jwg

invasive Microsoft feature poor market domination

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking - why did they post this as a story, who cares about Hotmail downtime, ...but then I realised that it IS important, it just goes to remind us all of how invasive one single company is, so invasive that in the software area that I specialise is, although there are well over 20 equivalent products, I already have to assess the QUALITY of products as such:

1. Microsoft: assessed: .. 80% on dominance, .. 10% luck, .. and 10% on product features
- it will get 15-50% of the market simply because of who it is, and will either be Market leader, or number 2.

2. All the others, which get assessed mainly 50-90% on product features.

So then of course the advice has to be, well one of the advantages of selecting the MS product because you know that you won't have to convert the data from some other system that will be driven into the ground by MS.

I can only advise clients the "truth" - that is what I get paid for, but I am not happy with this situation.

In this particular market segment, I can say that MS would not get in the "top 3" in terms of features.

This is a terribly sad situation to be in, and people need to be reminded of this regularly. The lack of action by authorities on Monopoly practices appears to show that the MS Billions have won the day.

I am not a Linux-plugger, and I know that MS has produced some good services, however these days they are way beyond the scope of traditional monopoly abuse. Are all politicians and scientists out there so "chicken" or greedy?

------------------
no sig. of course!

Re:i was talking to MS customer support when

[xk]

there was a delay in speech with the guy I was talking to as well

Microsoft outsourced their tech support to India?

Re:Yeah, I'll say...

[Awptimus Prime]

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.)

Yes.. That terrible, evil company.. They were so wrong to give you a free email service. How dare they..

Re:invasive Microsoft feature poor market dominati

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should find a new industry to participate in, since you are so unhappy with the way things are.

Life is too short.

Re:The guy is right

[anubi]

I don't know why 0x0d0a got a flamebait because what he said is absolutely true.

I have had days I could not log onto my PacBell account because of some difficulty they were having. No big deal. I have had a day where I could not log onto the ISP I am now with as a result of some technical problems they were having. They worked it out. No big deal.

I hardly thought this topic was even worth looking at. I guess I could jump all over someone for not doing a perfect job, but then, I don't do a perfect job at every attempt I make, regardless of my intentions. ( Actually, I get very few things perfect. The longer I work on it, the more I approach perfection, but I rarely get there.. often being forced by time and economics to accept "good enough" ).

I will rant till I am blue in the face if I think their failures are due to unsound practices ( aka embedded executables, unverifiable hidden crap, etc. ), but they just had server difficulty, and any of us that have to work on things of this size know how much more complex these things are than something, say, like a radio station or something.

For now, I guess there is no telling what was causing all the grief. As dynamic as a mail system is, I congratulate them for not losing all the mail. I sure have had things take me more than a day to fix. Actually I am impressed they keep it working as well as they do.

Microsoft started out really neat - remember how they helped all of us get out from under the control of "big iron". It wasn't until just a few years ago they got a bee in their bonnet to start making things very difficult to understand in order to hide the inner workings so various tricks and games could be used for intelletual property rights enforcement. Games which sometimes go wrong and leave a trail of innocent victims who paid for a product, but could not receive the benefit.

Dropping a day of Hotmail service... no big thing.

Releasing unverifiable code that I can't troubleshoot and fix if something goes awry - now that's a horse of a completely different color.

Re:Thanks, Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish i had problem with spam directly, but

[clip type="hotmail-attachment"]
Received: from host13-75.pool8249.interbusiness.it (host13-75.pool8249.interbusiness.it [82.49.75.13])
by lamx02.mgw.rr.com (8.12.10/8.12.8) with SMTP id i26HS6Tu003922
for ; Sat, 6 Mar 2004 12:28:22 -0500 (EST)
Received: from hotmail.com (mx1.hotmail.com [65.54.166.99])
by host13-75.pool8249.interbusiness.it (Postfix) with ESMTP id 88860B101C
for ; Sat, 06 Mar 2004 10:30:47 -0800
From: "Denature E. Hideaways"
To: Jokerr
Subject: RE:someone special sent you a greeting an
Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 10:30:47 -0800
Message-ID:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
X-GMX-Antivirus: 0 (no virus found)
X-Virus-Scanned: Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine
[/clip]

And there are many returned 'unable to deliver messages' waiting at hotmail inbox i have nothing to do with, damit.

Check those gift-horse teeth..

[k98sven]

When it comes to 'free' things on the internet, the old phrase 'don't look a gift-horse in the mouth' just doesn't apply: You should be giving that horse a full dental exam!

People do have a right to complain if they feel a service is bad, even if it's free. Especially if it's a service such as e-mail, which is a pain to switch. It takes time and they know this and exploit it.

Re:Thanks, Microsoft!

[AndroidCat]

You do know that the second Received line (from Hotmail) was forged, right? (Clues: Hotmail rarely relays email via a interbusiness.it dynamic IP. An Italian server using west coast time is odd. Adjusting for timezones the email was received an hour before it was sent.)

Re:Thanks, Microsoft!

[ScrewMaster]

All I know is, if my bank, my credit cards, or any of the other reliable online services that I use were as flaky as Hotmail (or any other Microsoft owned and operated Internet service) I'd simply use an alternative, and encourage my friends to as well. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that it really isn't competent to run a major online operation. That's why I don't use Passport, Hotmail, Messenger, indeed any Microsoft service (other than Windows Update) convenient as they might be at times.

Jabber

[amacleod98]

I tried to make use of this outage to help convince people to switch from MSN Messenger to Jabber [jabber.org]. Unfortunately everyone I know seems too entrenched in the Microsoft way of life to even consider switching. Jabber offers many independent servers so if one failed people would still be able to use another server.

Re:Dammit

[DrSkwid]

"hard to build"

is a relative term

opening the case and removing / inserting cards is considered harder than plugging in a scsi cable

> put the jumpers in the right places

ah, you seem to have missed the irq conflicting fun and the 'this board is hardwired to use address 0x300' when 0x300 was the reserved 'development' address manufacturers were supposed to leave free but often did quite the opposite.

I'm basing my story on working in b2b computer retail from 1990ish onwards in the time before Windows when Dos 3.3 was the operating system that shipped with PCs.

The time when you were a child.

Re:Yeah, I'll say...

[Awptimus Prime]

Read up to one of my previous posts. It's quite ignorant to put yourself in a position of becoming dependant upon a freebie mailbox.

Pay $100, get a domain registered for 10 years, pay a few dollars a month for someone to host your mail. This way, you have your "lifetime" email address you can take with you when your provider does something you don't agree with.

Anyone who depends on Hotmail, Yahoo, etc for their important email is not a good idea. The suckers that become dependant will learn the hard way.

Re:A successful migration?

[Mr. Piddle]

With Windows 2000 and IIS 5, the tools exist to optimize the performance and truly understand exactly what the code is doing at all times. (emphasis mine)

You mean I can attach a debugger to a running Windows kernel just like I can with UNIX kernels and look at header files and documentation to understand the data structures and run-time parameters?

Vendor-paid case studies. Lame 2001 reference: "My god, it's full of lies!"

Any IT professional that relies on a vendor-provided case study for decision making is incompetent.

Re:Microsoft IE Patch KB832894 - Could Wreck the W

[Anonymous Coward]

This patch seems to screw up lots of other things. Google 832894 in their groups [google.com] and you get lots of other stuff. Seems that .NET and Passport use XML to do some basic login, which the MS patch breaks. Makes me wonder how smart it is to have automatic updates for buggy patches that mess with the web standards we've had for years.

Re:That explains it...

[Adam9]

Maybe because millions of people don't use free java.sun.com e-mail addresses?