by Lance Whitney March 14, 2013 6:04 AM PDT
The glitch that took down Outlook and Hotmail on Tuesday was
caused by a temperature spike in a Microsoft data center.
Outlook and Hotmail users can blame the recent outage on an
overheated data center, Microsoft says.
On Tuesday at around 1:30 p.m. PT, the two online e-mail services
suffered a service disruption, rendering them inaccessible to many users.
Microsoft started to bring them back online the rest of the day and on into
Wednesday. But access wasn't fully restored until 5:43 a.m. yesterday,
according to the company.
Microsoft's status page confirmed that the problem was
repaired but offered no details as to the cause. Now the company has revealed
the source of the glitch in a blog from Arthur De Haan, a vice president of
test and service engineering for Windows Services.
On Tuesday, Microsoft updated firmware in a data center that
stores certain parts of Hotmail, Outlook, and SkyDrive. This update is
performed on a regular basis and usually runs smoothly. This time it failed,
triggering a rapid and huge rise in temperature in that data center.
The spike in heat caused certain safeguards to kick in for
many of the servers in that location. Those safeguards apparently cut off
access to Hotmail and Outlook mailboxes and prevented any automatic failover
that would've kept the services up and running. After the safeguards came on, a
Microsoft team stepped in to try to restore access.
Why did the problem take so long to fix?
"Based on the failure scenario, there was a mix of
infrastructure software and human intervention that was needed to bring the
core infrastructure back online," De Haan said. "Requiring this kind
of human intervention is not the norm for our services and added significant
time to the restoration."
De Haan also said that Microsoft is working hard to make
sure this type of problem doesn't happen again. But Outlook and Hotmail have
been hit by other issues this year.
In January, mobile users of the two services were unable to
access their e-mail for several days. In late February, Outlook.com was
inaccessible to some users.
Microsoft is phasing out Hotmail in favor of Outlook and is
in the process of moving Hotmail users to their new Outlook.com accounts.
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