In the official Windows Live blog, Microsoft’s Chris Jones informed that the Hotmail problems have now been fixed. Since 30 December, more than 17,000 customers did not have access to their messages. Jones explains:
Customers impacted temporarily lost the contents of their mailbox through the course of mailbox load balancing between servers. We identified the root cause and restored mail to the impacted accounts as of yesterday evening, January 2nd.
For the future, the Hotmail team is taking measures to avoid this error.
Compared to the total number of Hotmail users, relatively few people were affected. Nevertheless, the incident created much bad press, as media around the world published the news about it. Previously, Microsoft had invested a large budget into advertising the Windows Live offers, among them Hotmail.
In the last months, a hard competition has raised between Google and Microsoft, concerning the users’ favor. Of course, incidents like this one decrease the user trust quite fast. What do you think?