Outlook.com suffers downtime, but status page says otherwise
Microsoft's consumer e-mail service suffers downtime during the U.S. morning rush, but despite tweets sent out by the software giant, the status page still says the service is running.
Microsoft has confirmed that its consumer Web-based e-mail service, Outlook.com, is down for some people.
The Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant said on Twitter it is currently "aware of the issue," but did not detail what was causing the downtime. In another tweet, it was noted that it was not clear how long it would take to restore services but that "hacking is not suspected."
In many of the tweets sent by @MicrosoftHelps, the company posted a link to the site to Microsoft's service status page. However, at the time of writing, the site said that Outlook.com was still "running normally."
There was one note to the status page warning that Connected Services may be impacted, adding: "Customers may not be able to add or edit their Twitter connections...while trying to connect their Microsoft Account to Twitter." This does not relate to the service status of Outlook.com, however.
The Outlook.com issue comes only three days after the software company suffered an embarrassing outage to its Windows Azure storage service, caused by an expired security certificate.
Azure suffered a complete global meltdown after the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, used to securely authenticate the service, expired on Friday just after 12 p.m. PT, according to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley.
While HTTP-only users were not affected, many services suffered as a result of the expire certificate, including many other Microsoft cloud-based services, such as business and education users of Office 365. By Saturday morning, the outage ended after a new certificate was installed.
For some of the tens of millions of Outlook.com users, the downtime will be a jarring experience.
Outlook.com is the next-generation cloud e-mail service by Microsoft that will eventually replace Hotmail. Sporting a new Metro-style interface -- like that of Windows 8 -- and a bevy of new features, the company said "hundreds of millions" will be using the service by this summer.