Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Microsoft: Outlook and Hotmail outage is due to overheating data center

Mariella Moon
By
outlook
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Microsoft’s email services, Outlook and Hotmail, as well as SkyDrive (its cloud service) went through a lengthy downtime starting Tuesday afternoon. The service interruption ultimately lasted more than 16 hours, but the company was able to restore the services earlier for some users. While Microsoft initially didn’t offer an explanation for the outage, a post on the Outlook blog by Windows Services vice president Arthur de Haan revealed that it happened because of a “rapid and substantial temperature spike” in a data center that stores parts of those aforementioned services. 

According to Haan, Microsoft was updating firmware in the data center – a routine process – when servers started overheating, activating safeguards that blocked users’ access to Outlook, Hotmail, and SkyDrive. The safeguards came on quick enough to prevent damaging the servers, but the outage still lasted that long because the company had to call in personnel to restore access. “Requiring this kind of human intervention is not the norm for our services and added significant time to the restoration,” de Haan writes. He says Microsoft is working to prevent the same thing from happening in the future, which the company really should do if it wants users to stick to Outlook now that Gmail (which is also far from perfect) is the most used email service in the world.

Recommended Videos

Email outages are always supremely annoying, especially for those whose jobs include being glued to their inboxes, so we suggest routinely backing up your email by using clients like Thunderbird.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Mariella Moon
Mariella Moon
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Mariella loves working on both helpful and awe-inspiring science and technology stories. When she's not at her desk writing…
How to sync your Outlook Calendar with your Google Calendar
aop version 28 best value 15 inch laptops

It can be difficult to keep track of multiple calendars worth of events. And it can be especially hard when they span different calendar apps like Google Calendar and Outlook. You might then be looking for a way to sync the two apps' respective calendars between them. If you are, you've come to the right place.

Read more
Microsoft admits defeat on its controversial OneDrive change
Microsoft OneDrive files can sync between a PC and a phone

Microsoft has canceled plans to update how photos are stored on OneDrive after heavy criticism from its users.

The changes, which were set to go into place on October 16, would have made it so photos uploaded to your OneDrive account would count toward your data quota for every location they existed in your account, according to Neowin.

Read more
Microsoft accidentally released 38TB of private data in a major leak
A large monitor displaying a security hacking breach warning.

It’s just been revealed that Microsoft researchers accidentally leaked 38TB of confidential information onto the company’s GitHub page, where potentially anyone could see it. Among the data trove was a backup of two former employees’ workstations, which contained keys, passwords, secrets, and more than 30,000 private Teams messages.

According to cloud security firm Wiz, the leak was published on Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) GitHub repository and was accidentally included in a tranche of open-source training data. That means visitors were encouraged to download it, meaning it could have fallen into the wrong hands again and again.

Read more