Microsoft Hotmail/Passport Service Interrupted:UPDATED

Oryx Gazella writes "Unable to access Hotmail this Christmas morning? This would be why! You may have received an error like "unable to locate host", or "no such domain" after your browser was directed from www.hotmail.com to lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com. There are no NS records for the domain passport.com in any of the root name servers. Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) uses the Passport Service (www.passport.com) which allows users of the Microsoft Messenger Service to login using their "Passport" and to add other Passport members to their contact list. The new MSN Messenger Service 2.0 is integrated with MSN Hotmail and Microsoft Outlook Express for real-time email notification, and retrieval. " Not being a Hotmail or regular Windows user for that matter, I cannot verify this - but I've gotten several e-mails from people this morning wondering about it.Update: 12/26 01:39 by H :Click below to read the quite humourous conclusion to this story.

Effugas writes "Oh, this is just beautiful. Linux user Michael D. Chaney of Doublewide.Net, upon reading of Microsoft's Christmas loss of the passport.com domain, took it upon himself to donate $35.00 for the world's largest software company to restore service for its customers. I've heard about Linux empowering its users to truly prevent downtime, but this is ridiculous ;-) I'm still laughing--Merry Christmas, Microsoft, from the Linux community to you! "