Windows Live users hit with temporary outage
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Users of Hotmail, Xbox Live and other Windows Live services experienced an outage lasting about an hour on Tuesday.
According to Microsoft, the outage, which started at about 9 a.m. PST, was due to the loss of a server. As more requests directed to that server piled up, the extra load landed on the company’s other servers, causing the outage. Microsoft said that it replaced the troublesome server within an hour.
The outage was first noticed by Twitter users who tweeted about not being able to access their Windows Live services. Microsoft acknowledged the outage on its Twitter profile first and followed that with a blog post, saying that it plans to ‘fully investigate the cause and will take steps to prevent this from happening again.’
Twitter has become a reliable indicator for outages of all sorts. In September, Twitter erupted with tweets after Gmail experienced downtime for approximately 30 minutes. Over 10,000 tweets mentioned that outage.
-- Don Reisinger