Why Did Microsoft Hotmail Go Boom?

It hasn’t been a very happy New Year for Hotmail users this weekend, at least those who found their emails vaporised or unceremoniously dumped in their Deleted folder.

Many of those affected users promptly stormed Windows Live Solution Center’s online forums. Here’s one representative sample, which I also reprinted in an eWEEK article this morning: “When I logged into my account, all [my] email is gone,” posted one forum user on 31 December. “There should be 1600+ messages in my account. I need it recovered ASAP. I have critical business information in my email.”

By Sunday evening, Microsoft claimed it had fixed the problem underlying the email meltdown: “We have identified the source of the issue have restored email access to those who were effected,” a Microsoft moderator posted on the Windows Live Solution Center forums on 2 January. “We recognize that even though we restored email access, some of the affected users did not receive mail sent to them during the last 24-72 hours.”

(That moderator gets an “A” for effort, “C” for grammar.)

Problem solved?

The next morning, Microsoft then claimed problem solved. “We have restored the emails to those who were effected,” wrote another Microsoft forum moderator, whose grammar-school language teacher just died of a massive shame-induced aneurysm. “If you are still missing your emails, please post your issue here.”

Oh, they did.

“I’ve seen some reports of some people having their missing emails being restored, but mine are not,” read a note posted on the forums on 3 January at 10:31am. “What do I need to do?”

Others posted on my original eWEEK article.

“Microsoft is lying,” wrote someone there. “It’s been three days now since I’ve been able to even log into my Hotmail account, and there are thousands of complaints on Microsoft’s online tech forums saying the same thing as of mid-day Monday.”

“Microsoft lost all of my emails from 2004 through August 1 2010,” related another. “They kept telling me that it was my email client. I wrote 8 emails asking for help and they kept referring me to a help page that was of no help. All of my emails are gone.”

We need an explanation

A handful of comments, of course, don’t necessarily constitute a trend. However, as Microsoft pushes ever-deeper into cloud functionality and applications, it might do well to take a page from erstwhile rival Google, which has a history of posting detailed explanations for why its various applications occasionally crash and burn. Even Facebook, with its very occasional mass outage, takes the time afterwards to post a public explanation.

You don’t necessarily have to believe a company’s explanation for its failures, but the lack of any sort of answer frees people to conjecture about any and all causes – and on the web, where even the flimsiest things have a nasty habit of going viral at the speed of light, that sort of thing can snowball way out of proportion. Microsoft would do well to post an explanation of what happened, if it hasn’t planned one already.