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."
3rd party connections (Score:5, Interesting)
Redundancy anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dammit (Score:5, Interesting)
ahh the joys of the internet.
Looks like "Passport" problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Judging fromt the description that people had problems logging in, but that things work fine once logged in, and OTOH that Messenger had problems too, I would conclude that the problem is with their Passport infrastructure.
Problem trying to explain to clients (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps if it was some routine maintenance on Microsoft's part, they could forewarn people about it? It affects a lot of people's lives, whether free or not.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Redundancy anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think someone was implementing a new backup scheme and decided it would be a good idea to dismount the store, move it over to another cluster.
Course it looks like if people managed to get on their service was fine, so maybe they screwed up some passwords. Time will tell this story
Re:News for nerds? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! (Score:2, Interesting)
So it's not necessarily a "petty" thing as a "nice to know" thing... like all other slashdot stories... you are within your rights to refrain from reading the articles... no need to get grouchy if an article doesn't suit your taste. JUST DON'T READ IT! =P
Addbo
i was talking to MS customer support when (Score:5, Interesting)
Single point of failure (Score:5, Interesting)
That must have been one heck of an internal problem for it to knock out Hotmail AND MSN Messenger.
For example, the problem might have lain in the Passport login servers. Single sign-on is a single point of failure.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is also my first email account (got it in 96) and so now people can still contact me after I've moved around the world.
When a service like Hotmail and MSN go down for a few hours it affects ALOT (millions) of people... nerd included... why shouldn't it be on the frontpage? I know I was interested enough to click on the articles (though I agree they are sparse on details)
Addbo
Re:News for nerds? (Score:1, Interesting)
What web based email account do you use.
Hotmail
Yahoo
Lycos
Mailinator
Telepathy
CowboyNeal's
Re:Single point of failure (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Normally I'd just assume you were referring to the password issue but right now that has nothing to do with this story so I'll just leave my assumptions out this.What I liked most... (Score:2, Interesting)
not know if they were under attack or not.
They first thought some hacker took down their
system. Then they realized it was some "internal"
fsck-up.
How can a service of that magnitude with M$
money backing it not realize it was/was not
under attack?
Even if there were some coincidental attack
going on at the same time (it's probably
a constant issue with big sites), it's
shocking that they could not properly analyze
the attack to see if it could explain something
like, oh, say, the ENTIRE FSCKING SERVICE
being unavailable.
In a way, this tells us plenty about the
quality of service. Not only does it go
down from time to time, but the company
running it is not able to accurately
communicate what the problem is.
Neither Use Hotmail nor Messenger but... (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, both these services have millions of users. And from what I hear from these users, both services go down pretty frequently, messenger especially so.
Apparently things have gotten worse since MSN 6 came into being. I have seen MSN 6, and it has the words "lame ass" written all over it.
If what I hear is true, it takes 2 minutes to login to MSN 6. Quite a lot of your IMs are bounced back.
Considering I got this ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Luckily I don't use Hotmail (or any other Microsoft product).
Re:Predictable (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it would make more sense when Microsoft would claim it was an attack. Internal problems can be blaimed on the company (bad software design, bad system administration, etc.), external attacks can't, only for a lack of security or something like that. But in most cases, a company gets away quite well with an external attack.
A successful migration? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the MS case study [microsoft.com] on converting Hotmail from FreeBSD to 2K:
> Changing the operating system on each server should have
> zero impact on day-to-day operations.
No impact whatsoever....if you ignore uptimes
> Under FreeBSD, bugs and memory leaks would often go
> undetected because of the lack of tools. 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.
Crikey, handy they've got all those tools to help them out (soooo unlike FreeBSD with all it's bug leaks). Looks like it's saved their asses this time round...
</sarcasm>
Microsoft: Where do you want go today?
Customer: I want to take a rock solid service that has true customer value and turn it into a spam ridden, bug infested hole that doesn't work half the time and customers hate.
Microsoft: Consider it done!
Re:Redundancy anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
My only guess is that someone at MS really messed up their own DNS systems, which of course would take it all "down" (by name at least). Does anyone know what actually happened?
It looked like an infrastructure issue, to me. Possibly a downed router (or three?). I could tracert Hotmail from a couple remote sites, but not others. It looked like a dead route.
Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory it should only take a matter of minutes to rollback the entire thing... and you would've thought they'd test it before deploying any changes.
Sounds like somebody screwed the pooch on this one.
Re:This is news??? Who the fuck cares! (Score:3, Interesting)
They proabably rolled a change out to all servers via SMS (not the text messaging protocol) and couldn't back it out
Re:Yeah, I'll say... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not free. It's ad-supported, meant to make them money. It's MS' aim to draw people in so they can suck money from them. If they want to make money, they could provide a better service, namely one that people are willing to use. What would you say if the provider of your primary email account, something you've come to rely upon, was bought out by $MULTINATIONAL_CORP and you started getting 5 megs of spam email a day?
Paid for services down too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lets get this straight (Score:4, Interesting)
Last, but by no means least, anyone who uses other Passport authenticated services, like MSDN (Costs over $2K a year, I have it) was unable to connect. Considering that many of those services are the very ones that people need to prep for deployment of XP SP2, which I would wager a lot of organizations were planning on testing and/or deploying this weekend, having the tech resources needed to properly configure and evaluate that deployment off-line presents a major problem.
Your assertion that no-one of consequence, or who paid for a service, was harmed is complete BS. It simply indicates that you have no idea what else Passport authenticates, or maybe even how Hotmail works.
Re:That explains it... (Score:4, Interesting)
If Pirates of Silicon Valley Is Correct.... (Score:4, Interesting)