Microsoft Mail Services: What was the Deal with the Microsoft Hotmail, Outlook Outage?

Microsoft Mail Services: Is there anything worse than an email outage? This is something that people dread for a variety of reasons. As you may have heard, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) didn’t do itself any favors in the reliability department on Tuesday when the company faced a email service disruption.

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Making things even worse was the fact that this outage lasted longer than most would have expected.

So, what was the deal? Why did this happen? If you want to know specifics, you don’t have to look any further than the company’s official Outlook blog.

Here is an excerpt from the “root cause analysis” portion of the post:

“At 13:35 PM PDT on March 12^th, 2013 there was a service interruption that affected some people’s access to a small part of the SkyDrive service, but primarily Hotmail.com and Outlook.com. Availability was restored over the course of the afternoon and evening, and fully restored by 5:43 AM PDT on March 13^th, 2013.”

“On the afternoon of the 12^th, in one physical region of one of our datacenters, we performed our regular process of updating the firmware on a core part of our physical plant. This is an update that had been done successfully previously, but failed in this specific instance in an unexpected way. This failure resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the datacenter. This spike was significant enough before it was mitigated that it caused our safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacenter.”

In short, the outage was related to an overheated data center. While this is an acceptable reason for the outage, it doesn’t mean that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) users are any less forgiving. When people want to access their email account any delay can be a major annoyance.

Hopefully the same issues don’t come up in the near future as Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) moves Hotmail users over to the Outlook service.

Check back here for more updates on Microsoft Mail Services.

DISCLOSURE: I have no positions in any stock mentioned.

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