Uh oh: Microsoft Hotmail, Outlook troubles bubble up again

Hotmail and Outlook.com e-mail services are down again for many customers and have been for several hours, according to Twitter reports and Microsoft’s own Twitter Support account.

@ronan_kelly We are aware the Hotmail/Outlook services are down and doing our best to fix it. See spr.ly/6010nTnk for updates. ^KLM—
Microsoft Support (@MicrosoftHelps) February 25, 2013

This is just more bad news for the popular Hotmail email service that suffered a big snafu on January 8, and folks don’t have much of a sense of humor about it. Indeed some GigaOM commenters say the problems have persisted for them since that time — all the while the Microsoft status page registering no issue. The UK’s IT Pro reported on the latest issue here, laying the blame on the snafu on the ongoing migration of Hotmail users over to Outlook.com.

An outage is definitely not good but what’s really troubling here, as ITPro points out, is that the Hotmail/Outlook.com status pages reflect no problem at all. If cloud service purveyors want customers to come aboard, they need to provide a real window into what’s going on — the good and the bad. And this lack of disclosure — except thank goodness for Twitter — is unacceptable.