Outages Hit Outlook Services, New York Times Website
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Two of the Internet's most popular destination sites were temporarily offline Wednesday.
KNX 1070's Megan Goldsby reports users of the Outlook Hotmail service, as well as subscribers of the New York Times website, woke up to find the websites out of service.
Outages Hit Outlook Services, New York Times Website
Starting early Wednesday morning, some users reported being able to log in to Hotmail but not actually view their messages, while others were unable to advance past the password prompt screen.
Upon logging in, users encountered a message reading, "There's a problem signing in. If you continue to have this problem, please report it to Microsoft."
The issue apparently affected Outlook along with companion services People and Skydrive, while the Messenger service appeared to be unaffected.
Access to Outlook, People, and SkyDrive appeared to be at least partially restored shorly before 11:30 a.m.
The New York Times website and its smartphone app were also temporarily down, with the news outlet citing "technical difficulties" before restoring service sometime around 10:30 a.m.
The company said on Twitter the outage was "the result of an internal issue." A spokeswoman said the cause is under investigation.
A service disruption that left Outlook and Hotmail users without email access for nearly 16 hours back in March was later blamed on overheating servers in Microsoft's data center.
As recently as 2011, Hotmail was estimated to have more than 360 million users per month. The New York Times website has been ranked among the top five most popular websites on the Internet with more than 59.5 million estimated unique monthly visitors.
