Microsoft said it has now restored Hotmail service. The return to normal follows reports by some users about missing e-mails and folders, as well as complaints about not receiving new e-mails.
Over the holiday weekend, the company received a flood of posts on its message board about the missing e-mails. There were also reports that some e-mails were sent to folders that had been deleted. But Microsoft spokesperson Catherine Brooker said Monday that service and e-mails are back to normal, and the problem didn’t affect all users — although the company didn’t release the number of users impacted.
‘Sincerely Apologize’
Brooker told news media that the cause is still being investigated to ensure the incident isn’t repeated.
In a posting on its Windows Live Solution Center site, the company said Monday that users who are still missing e-mails should post their issues at windowslivehelp.com. “We sincerely apologize and thank you for your continued patience,” the company wrote.
On Sunday, a posting by the company had said that service was restored, although, at that time, some users hadn’t received e-mail sent to them within the last 24 to 72 hours.
The message board has several hundred screens of postings from users about e-mails that were inexplicably lost or deleted, with some complaints posted as early as November.
Early on Monday, for instance, a user called Muffythemidget noted that “everything in the last three months has been deleted from my sent box,” that her contacts list disappeared, and that her friends were receiving “adverts about iPods which apparently have been sent from my account.”
Related To New Year?
There is some indication that the problem could be tied to the new year. A user named justneehelp wrote Sunday that, after logging in on Dec. 31, all the folders and e-mails were gone. For the first two days of the…