LiveSide - News blog

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.

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 (blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft).

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.

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.

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.