Overheating equipment is culprit in Hotmail-Outlook disruption – Microsoft

Published March 16, 2013 12:45pm

Microsoft has blamed overheating equipment at a data center for a brief outage that hit the Hotmail and Outlook.com email services last March 12.

In a blog post, Microsoft Vice President for Test and Service Engineering for Windows Services Arthur de Haan said a firmware update in one of the data centers failed "in an unexpected way."

"This failure resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the data center. This spike was significant enough before it was mitigated that it caused our safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the data center," de Haan said.

Such safeguards "prevented access to mailboxes housed on these servers and also prevented any other pieces of our infrastructure to automatically failover and allow continued access," he added.

The affected area houses parts of the Hotmail.com, Outlook.com, and SkyDrive infrastructure, preventing some people from accessing those services.

De Haan apologized to users who could not access their email during the interruption.

"Outages are something we take very seriously and invest a significant amount of our time and energy in doing our best to prevent," he said.

De Haan said the service interruption affecting Hotmail and Outlook.com started at 1:35 p.m. PDT of March 12. The service was restored by 5:43 a.m. PDT on Wednesday.

"We hope this helped provide an understanding of the incident and again, we sincerely apologize and regret the impact this outage had on all of you. Now that we're through the resolution, we're also hard at work on ensuring this doesn't happen again," he said. – KDM, GMA News

Tags: hotmailoutlook, microsoft, downedemailservice