The Ashes

Yesterday many Hotmail, Live, and MSN users have reported that they cannot sign into their email accounts. Users were getting a message that said “You don’t have an inbox…yet” and they were pushed to register a new account therefore many have feared that they have lost all of their correspondence. People tend to go crazy when something like this happens, and with the latest reports about the Conficker worm, some said that the virus attacked Microsoft’s servers.

Well, the Conficker vs. Microsoft’s servers war didn’t happen (yet) as the Windows Live team made an official announcement that this is only a temporary outage, and your inbox is safe. This exactly what we had in mind therefore we don’t really understand why everybody freaked out. The problem was caused by a networking issue while the Windows Live team was doing routine maintenance. Users were receiving an incorrect message when trying to access their email accounts due to a temporary outage and Microsoft officially declared that your inbox is safe, and your emails are there.

After a while, the Windows Live team announced that the networking issue was solved, just like all other issues caused by the outage, and that users should be able to login into their Hotmail or other Windows Live email services. However, the problem was far from being solved as many users were still reporting that they cannot access their emails and they were getting the same message: “You don’t have an inbox…yet”.

You don’t have to be a genius to think that people went crazy once more and blamed the Conficker worm. Users feared that their computer is infected with Conficker which somehow prevents them for accessing Hotmail and Live accounts. The Windows Live team checked Microsoft’s servers once again, and they noticed that the temporary outage persists.

Personally, I don’t think that the Conficker caused the outage, this is just a story made up by crazy people. The worm will probably attack some other time. Meanwhile, we’re just waiting for the Windows Live team to solve the issues.

P.S. My Windows Hotmail account works perfectly, and also I can use the Windows Live Messenger.

Update: A Hotmail user claims that he can access his account, but he has lost of all his emails from March.

Update 2: A user reports that this is a browser issue, and you can login using the Sea Monkey browser.

Update 3: Users still experiencing Hotmail problems, still no inbox for them.

Update 4: Unconfirmed: more Hotmail problems as many accounts appeared to have been hacked! We think that these are only scam/phishing emails.

Update 5: “I can’t login into my messenger,” many users say. But inbox seems to be back!