Hotmail Service Too Busy

According to the company the service has been restored for all the users by the evening. They do not cite the reasons for the problem apologized to Hotmail users for the inconvenience.

Microsoft Corp. scrambled to fix a global outage that hit its Windows Live Hotmail service for several hours on Thursday.

The company said in a blog posting that "service has been restored for all users" around 5 p.m. Eastern time and that it was "taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again." It also apologized to Hotmail users for the inconvenience but did not say what caused the problem.

According to Microsoft, the Twitter users said they were receiving a "Server is too busy" message when they tried to log into Hotmail, which has more than 375 million active users worldwide. It was the second outage for a major online e-mail service this week, as Google's Gmail service also went down for about 36 hours for some users.

In recent times, Microsoft and Google, which are competing to bring more Web-based services to consumers and businesses, e-mail has been a proving ground for how many users their online services can support. Outages raise questions about the ability of those companies and other online service providers to maintain a consistent quality of service for end users.