Microsoft Forced To Apologize For Massive Outlook.com Outage

Outlook.com isn't a beta service anymore. Microsoft is shutting down Hotmail and is in the process of moving people over to Outlook.com

The email service went down on Tuesday afternoon at about 1:30 pacific and wasn't back up until 5:30 a.m. pacific Wednesday morning. It also affected Hotmail.com, the calendar and parts of SkyDrive. Skydrive is for online storage and Office apps.

Microsoft PR downplayed the outage, saying it only affected a small amount of people.

But on Tuesday, the Outlook.com status page was full of red warnings, notes GigaOm's Barb Darrow. That's interesting because in February, when people were also complaining about an outage, Microsoft said the status page won't affect a problem if only a small number of people are affected, Darrow reports.

So, it stands to reason, if the status page was lit, the outage must have been big.

By Wednesday, Microsoft was forced to apologize.

In a blog post, vice president Arthur de Haan, explained why the service went down and insisted that the status page "is always the best and most reliable way" to get info on service interruptions. If you access the page while logged in to your account, it will be customized for your account, he says.

But, if you can't log in, and Microsoft doesn't deem your outage to be big enough to report, that might be another story.