Hotmail Users Panic During Outage
On April 10, 2009 Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail suffered a service outage affecting thousands of users. Upon logging in to Hotmail, they received a message that their inbox had yet to be set up, and any previous inbox contents had disappeared. In response, users experiencing problems turned to the internet, and to several web sites offering technical support.
Microsoft was quoted as saying "On Thursday evening, there was a short-term service disruption which prevented Windows Live Hotmail customers worldwide from accessing their in-box for approximately two hours. Microsoft worked quickly to restore access. No data was lost during the outage. Microsoft apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused."
"When your inbox disappears there's a tendency to panic" said Leo Notenboom, operator of the technical support question and answer site Ask Leo!. "It was obvious something was up that evening as I noticed my server was experiencing extremely high volumes of traffic", he continued. "The common thread was simply 'Hotmail', so I logged into my own Hotmail account, and sure enough - my inbox was gone. I use twitter to post some reassurances that this was obviously a system problem at Hotmail that would be cleared up, and of course in a couple of hours it was."
A sudden onslaught of visitors is not unheard of on the web, but it's more commonly associated with bookmarking or news sites like slashdot.org - from which the term "being slashdotted" or rendering a site unreachable due to exceptionally heavy load, originated. Social media services such as Digg, StumbleUpon and others have been known to render a site inaccessible with a sudden burst of popularity.
Reference sites, such as Ask Leo!, can feel the effects of a different type of popularity. Ranking highly in Google for Hotmail and Hotmail related questions, these sites often feel the brunt of service outages and other problems that occasionally plague the service. An article such as "Why is my MSN Hotmail Inbox suddenly empty?" is a natural and obvious result for the search terms people enter as the try to understand what happened to their inbox.
While sites like Ask Leo!, The Internet Patrol and others all experienced heavy load, for the most part they were able to service the demand - barely.
One lesson was clear, according to Notenboom: "Now that I know that a problem at Hotmail can quickly translate into a problem on my site, I think it's time for me to build in some more spare capacity."
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Leo A. Notenboom owns and operates Ask Leo!, a free technical question and answer sites that helps over a million visitors each month get answers to their tech questions. http://ask-leo.com
