Windows Live Hotmail (former Hotmail) is one of – if not the most – popular free webmail applications on the planet, so naturally there’s a bit of an uproar (warning: highly emotional teenager grunts here) since apparently users have been unable to access their mail account for hours on end. We’ve been getting a lot of tips about this in our inboxes, so we ended up taking a look at the official Windows Live Help website, where this message appears:
Hotmail and Windows Live ID experienced a service disruption starting at 8:44 PM (PST), which ended at 10:15 PM (PST), and during this disruption you may have been told your inbox did not exist. This was incorrect messaging. Your inbox, contacts and Live ID are all intact. We’re all Hotmail customers, so we appreciate how frustrating this experience was. Thanks for your understanding. If you’re still getting errors, please close out all browsers and sign in again.
It’s after midnight in California at the time of this writing, so according to Microsoft the service disruption should have stopped over 2 hours ago. The problem is that most of the tips we received came in after that time (and keep on coming), so the issue doesn’t seem to have been resolved completely, provided of course the tipsters have effectively tried to restart their browsers.