Microsoft's Hotmail and Outlook services went down for a big portion of the user base earlier this morning and over 12 hours on there's still a lot of people unable to access their email.
While this writer has no problem accessing his old Hotmail account, the Microsoft Status page is suggesting that there are still problems with the service. “We're having a problem accessing email. You might not be able to see all your email messages. We're working to restore service right now,” it reads for Hotmail and a similar message for Outlook.
The last update was at 09:11 this morning, with the next update expected within the next half an hour.
At the time of writing there are also a lot of Hotmail users taking to Twitter to voice their complaints. Interestingly, a lot of them seem to come from non-English speaking countries, perhaps suggesting a more international outage.
On the plus side for Microsoft, it initially had problems with Calendar and Skydrive too, but those issues have now apparently been fixed, as the status page suggests that they are running normally.
KitGuru Says: This isn't great news for Microsoft, which has seen its footprint in the online email game reduce significantly in recent years thanks to the growth of rival services like Gmail. Where once Hotmail was the darling of net users everywhere, it's hard to find someone that uses it now.
the reason for foreign speakers is because Microsoft are racially targeting Asia etc, because they are ‘less important’ than the European and USA markets