Opened Twitter today to a rash of “Hotmail is Down” tweets, and sure enough, the Hotmail server is “too busy” as of 9:14 am pdt:

Online mail application server outages have been in the news recently, with a couple of notable Gmail glitches making news, and as “cloud services” gain more attention. 

Judging from the number of tweets, the Hotmail outage appears to be widespread.  Since we first noticed the outage, which had apparently been going on for 10 minutes or so, and started writing this post, another 15 minutes have past, meaning the outage is at least 1/2 hour old.  We’ll update as soon as we hear more.

Update: I was able to access Hotmail (very slowly) as of 9:46am pdt, and a new “temporarily unavailable” message is posted on MSN.com:

Looks like the service is returning, although it is not back to 100% yet, as access is still spotty.

Update #2: As of 11:30am pdt, Hotmail seems to be working normally.