Microsoft confesses to New Year Hotmail blunders

[mountaintree16]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/07/microsoft_explains_hotmail_outage/

Microsoft's Hotmail saw the New Year in with a whimper, after thousands of its users were unable to access their web-based email accounts.

Yesterday the company explained what went wrong, offered a relatively minor apology given the scale of the cockup, and said it would endeavor to prevent similar mistakes in the future.

Worse still, it also coughed to separate "data loss issues" on the software vendor's increasingly tarnished Hotmail service.

Microsoft's Mike Schackwitz blamed a script error on the first outage that affected 17,355 users, who had reported a major problem that downed some mailboxes on 30 December.

However, Redmond didn't take full action until two days later when it finally raised the priority of the issue, after reports continued to flood in from unhappy users.