Hotmail 'Issue' Resolved after Several Days of Lost Content

Many users of Windows Hotmail wound up getting an unwanted New Year’s surprise after they temporarily lost the contents of their inboxes for several days.

Starting on Dec. 30, an “issue” affected 17,355 of Hotmail’s email accounts, according to a Windows Live blog post.

Users “lost the contents of their mailbox through the course of mailbox load balancing between servers,” says Windows Live Corporate Vice President Chris Jones in a posting. “We identified the root cause and restored mail to the impacted accounts as of… Jan. 2.”

“As with all incidents like this, we will fully investigate the cause and will take steps to prevent this from happening again,” Jones added.

The initial response on blogs was so frantic that Download Squad predicted in a blog post the number of affected users “could easily be in the millions.” Notice of the much smaller number of affected users was reported on Monday by Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Windows.

In addition, there were hundreds of pages of complaints on a Microsoft online forum.

This is not the only recent outage experienced by Hotmail users. In November 2010, Gmail and Hotmail both experienced significant outages, reported TMCnet.

Gmail had a short outage in November that was resolved after about 10 minutes or more. The Hotmail outage lasted anywhere from one to seven hours, reported TMCnet. The cause of that outage was reported to be “maintenance-related,” said TMCnet. 

Hotmail is a free, Web-based e-mail service. It is the most popular e-mail service in the world, with some 360 million users globally, based on data from comScore (News - Alert) Inc., reports the Associated Press.

Hotmail says on its website that it allows its users to “Save time and get more done.” Its users “can send up to 10 GB in attachments and get content and updates from sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, and YouTube (News - Alert) -- without leaving your inbox.”