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Windows Live service restored (again?, still?)

Feb 29, 2008 1:03 pm by Kip Kniskern | 4 comments

See, is this so hard? The Email Support Space blog posts tonight, reporting that “nearly all customers are once again able to sign in”, with some specific information coming for customers who are still unable to login, “once you log in” (ummmm, ahhhh, no, wait – deep breath – don’t go there). Anyway whatever the problem was (and problems do happen) we’re glad to hear that it’s fixed, and especially glad to see even this little bit of communication from Microsoft on the subject. Here’s the post, in total:

February 28
WIndows Live ID and Hotmail Service Restored
Good afternoon everyone -
We’ve been busy working to restore our services after the recent downtime, and by our estimates, nearly all customers are once again able to sign in with their Live ID and access services like Hotmail and Messenger.
There is a very small group of customers who are still unable to login, but we’re hoping to restore that final bit of service Thursday afternoon (today), PST. If you are a member of this group, once you log in, you will see a message from us “Hotmail Customer Support” with some specific information about your experience and instructions if you need more assistance.
No service provider likes their service to be down, and we do everything possible to avoid it and then mitigate when it happens. I am especially grateful for your patience and good humor during these times.
Thanks.
Michael
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We’d be interested to see the “specific information about your experience”, so if you’re one of the lucky ones, and wouldn’t mind posting the info in the comments, it would be much appreciated. And special thanks to “Michael”, for the information – that’s much appreciated, too.

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MisinformedDNA
I give you insider info, though it is vague as I a) I’m not on those aliases anymore as a result of position change and b) probably couldn’t tell you anyway. But here’s what happens. When something goes bad, like the above problem, we have what we call a high pri. When things like this happen, people do not eat, relax or use the bathroom. Maybe not entirely true, but they don’t get to do things are their schedule. What I’m trying to say is that dozens of people could be working on it, from checking connections to reading log files to who knows what. No one is allowed to bother these people with anything, nothing is more important than a live site issue.
Sometimes, they get resolved, emails are sent out and then, oh crap, it’s back! They thought they solved the problem when they actually just solved a symptom. They are actually pretty good at getting it right the first time, but it doesn’t always happen that way.
Microsoft wasn’t lieing when they said it was fixed, they really believed that. For all you programmers & IT peeps out there, we all nothing sucks more than getting a big problem, fixing it, only to find out it wasn’t. It sucks bad. But you deal with it and move on.
It sucks to be the customer without access, I know. But if people are leaving Hotmail for this, I hope they have more reasons than this, because all services go down (unfortunately) and Hotmail actually has pretty dang good reliability from my experience.
Kip Kniskern
Interesting that your “insider info” contradicts directly what Microsoft has said publically: that the first issue was resolved, and then a separate, unrelated issue, affecting only a small portion of users, happened shortly after the first issue was fixed (http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1228).
And it is not the outage itself that is so concerning, rather the lack of transparency and communication from Microsoft, leaving journalists to provide users with information about their mail service.
MisinformedDNA
Sorry, I wasn’t commenting on this instance particularly, just past observations.
I’m not sure how else you want MS to communicate with users who can’t read email. When email goes down, you best bet to communicate with users in getting journalists to write about it. That seemed to work pretty well.
As for being more transparent, they said it was a network issue, I guess they could be more specific. Maybe they should be, I dunno. I’ve seen some of the specifics, usually it’s a lot less interesting than you would think.
Chris
I guess Kip is considering that a large number of Hotmail/Messenger users would also visit MSN.com, which is one possible means of alerting users to the availability. Ironically there is a messenger server status page, but I can’t recall that ever being updated for downtime.