Topic: Hotmail bug delete all mails for some users

[Samker]

Microsoft's free email service, Hotmail, has recently begun showing a number of users empty mailboxes for no apparent reason.

The bug -- which has seen many Hotmail users swarm to the official forums complaining after it first appeared on the 31st December -- appears to remove or at least display all folders as being empty and won't show any emails, with affected accounts appearing as brand new accounts and users even recieving the welcoming email.

"Hotmail deleted all my emails and made it like a brand new account," one frustrated user posted. "Please help. I don't care about deleted emails, but everything else is extremely important": http://www.windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspx?threadid=8ab85e00-87a4-49a3-85c2-ec845d21a6da&page=1

It's unclear if messages have actually been deleted, although more than likely they are being hidden by a bug or problem with the Hotmail platform. Some users report being able to login once and seeing one or two recent emails, before logging out and back in again then finding their inbox completely empty.

Users frustrated at the time it's taking for the problem to be solved have even headed to Facebook, creating a group to raise awareness about the bug and the seemingly slow response from Microsoft to provide a solution: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_177265898971105
63 people have so far joined the group.

Microsoft has now acknowledged the problem, but told the BBC the issues only affect a "small subset" of users and should be resolved soon - there's no current timeframe for a fix to be made available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12103707
In the meantime, the company has apologised for the problems, saying they are "sorry" for any inconvenience caused.

(NW)

[Samker]

Hotmail email issues 'now resolved'

It's official, straight from the Windows Live Blog: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2011/01/03/hotmail-email-access-issue-now-resolved.aspx
Your Hotmail issues have now been resolved. For those of you that missed it: from 30 December 2010, 17,355 Hotmail accounts were impacted when the Hotmail servers failed to correctly balance server loads – put simply, those users temporarily 'lost the contents of their mailboxes'. The messages weren't 'lost' though, and all affected users have had their emails restored as of 2 January 2010.

Microsoft claims that they're still investigating the cause of the issue and has yet to explain the outage. The outage itself seems to have caused a PR headache for Microsoft, considering the small amount of impacted accounts, with the BBC and other news agencies picking up the story. Additionally, affected users used Facebook and Twitter to vent their frustrations, making the problem appear more widespread than it was. Microsoft has again apologised to the affected users and businesses, and state that they're working to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Microsoft has been working hard in recent years to increase the capabilities and stability of its online services, including Hotmail. As Google and Microsoft really begin to battle in the software as a service space (Google/Google Apps versus Office Live/Windows Live/Bing), issues like this are likely to damage business confidence in the company's online offerings – perhaps to the benefit of its much-loved competitor. Currently, Microsoft's Hotmail is the second most visited webmail site in the US (behind Yahoo), with Gmail receiving around half the traffic of Hotmail: http://www.liveside.net/2010/11/12/hotmail-yahoo-continue-to-dominate-gmail-we-knew-that/

(NW)

[krrjhn]

Thanks to make it easy for me!!