Hotmail And Outlook Were Hit By Ongoing Fault

Users of outlook and Hitmail have been hit by a lengthy fault, Microsoft has confirmed. A status message informed users on Wednesday morning about the issues, with the company adding it was," Working to restore service right now." Users reported not seeing emails that should have reached their account. Microsoft is in the process of migrating millions of users from Hotmail, which was launched in 1990, to new Outlook.com accounts. Problems began to hit the services on Tuesday evening, with Microsoft acknowledging it had a problem at 21:35 GMT. According to reports some users noted being unable to see certain emails in the accounts, while others reported emails were simply inaccessible altogether. A message posted to Microsoft's service status page on Wednesday morning said, " Fixing the problem is taking longer than we hoped. We apologize for the lengthy interruption in service." Some users have suggested there have been similar issues on the SkyDrive cloud storage service, but Microsoft has offered no comments on the reports. Hotmail users will be migrasted to new Outlook.com service, but can retain their Hotmail.com email asdress should they wish. The move has been seen as attempt by the Window-makers to claw back ground lost to competitors such as Google, whose Gmail service has proved immensely popular since its launch in 2004. In a Blog Post explaining the changes the Microsoft's David Law wrote," When we say that we are confident Outlook.com is the best email choice for the consumers, we mean it." " As Outlook comes out of preview, we are also announcing that we will soon upgrade every Hotmail user to Outlook.com" "the upgrade is seamless and instant".