Microsoft admits: we still haven't fixed Hotmail

Microsoft was this morning struggling to find out why tens of millions of Hotmail users were left without access to their e-mail accounts yesterday.

Access to all of Microsoft's web-based communication tools - including Hotmail and instant messaging accounts - was blocked across the globe for several hours in the early afternoon yesterday

The problems, which affected the 80 million people who use Hotmail worldwide, were fixed within a couple of hours, Microsoft said, although late this afternoon many Times Online readers reported still being unable to log in.

"Yesterday, an issue began that has caused some consumers worldwide to experience difficulty logging in to their Windows Live ID accounts," Microsoft said in a statement. "This issue has since been resolved and normal operations have been restored to all customers."

Among the countries where users reported difficulties using Hotmail from 11.15am GMT yesterday were the US, the UK, Finland, the Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic, and Honduras.

"It's now late afternoon GMT and I still cannot log onto Hotmail," Brian, a user from Manchester, said today. "Is it me or has Microsoft got in to bad habits of telling ther customers that the problems are fixed when they have not?"

"I cannot take this sort of outage for my business again," wrote one Denver-based user. "This comes at a mission-critical time for me. Not a good story for Microsoft Live."

Microsoft said in a statement this morning that Hotmail users were now able to log in again, although the company would not elaborate on the cause of the outage, saying only that it had worked "aggressively" to resolve what it called a unique problem.

Hotmail, which has been rebranded Windows Live Hotmail since being taken over by Microsoft, accounts for 24 per cent of the world's web-based e-mail accounts, a fraction behind Yahoo!, which has 25 per cent. More than ten million people use the service in the UK alone, according to Nielsen Online.

Two weeks ago, eight million BlackBerry customers in the US were left without access to their e-mail for several hours. It was the second time in a year that the network had failed.

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming