Windows Live Hotmail Inboxes Mysteriously Disappear, Outage to Blame

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 13 Apr 2009

Things don’t appear to be very rosy for the Windows Live team nowadays as yet another glitch has caused numerous users to go into panic mode – the glitch I am talking about is a Windows Live Hotmail outage that mislead users to believe their inbox had vanished all of a sudden and they had to set up a new account if they wanted to use Hotmail. This incident follows one that occurred last week when Windows Live Messenger users received an erroneous message from the Windows Live Messenger Service Staff informing them that they need to change their email address if they want to continue signing in to Windows Live Messenger (details here).

“Some of you may have experienced an unusual message when you tried to sign in to Windows Live earlier this (Thursday) evening (PST), a message that said “You don’t have an inbox…yet.” The incorrect message was sent out, caused by a networking issue that we encountered while doing routine maintenance. We have corrected the problem and you should be able to access your Hotmail and other Windows Live services again now. We apologize for any inconvenience that was caused by this issue, and we thank you for using Windows Live,” explained the Windows Live Team.

The problem with Windows Live Hotmail has been fixed and users should no longer experience any problems. If you experience any problems with your Windows Live online services you should first check out the Windows Live Help section (here); if you cannot find an answer for your issue, you can submit it to the support team (here).

On a side note, it seems that Windows Live Hotmail was not the only web service to be hit by an outage. According to LiveSide, Xbox Live and Zune Marketplace users also experienced some issues, and the blame for it all can be placed on the same “networking problem” that caused Windows Live Hotmail to go down.


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