You might wonder why your Hotmail email is not working now when it was just working yesterday, or two days ago, or even just few hours ago. Is Hotmail service temporarily down? A good and valid question.
Millions of email users are utilizing the free Hotmail email service, now Outlook.com. Because of this huge volume of users, sometimes Hotmail servers experience technical problems causing an unscheduled maintenance service interruption. So before concluding that your account could have been hacked, or your computer being infected with a virus or malware, it is always good to check the actual service status of Hotmail and its related services like Messenger, SkyDrive, and others.
There are 2 ways to do this. First, check the status as posted by Microsoft. You just need to go to listed links below:
https://status.live.com/ => Check the overall “current” service status for Hotmail and all services.
https://status.live.com/history => Check the historical downtime history as reported by Hotmail.
Another way to check if Hotmail is temporarily down is by checking a third-party monitoring service using this link => http://downrightnow.com/hotmail.
How to Report a Problem with Hotmail?
Now, suppose you are having problems with your Hotmail and when you checked, the status of Hotmail or Outlook.com is reported as “Running normally” and when checking http://downrightnow.com/hotmail it says Hotmail is down, you have 2 ways to report to Hotmail that you are having problems as well. As this figure increases, Hotmail will be notified in order to start investigating if the issue is with their servers.
First, in the http://downrightnow.com/hotmail site, you can click on “Report a problem” button. As people are clicking on this button, the figure increases raising a red flag for Hotmail.
Second, you can report the problem using the form provided by Microsoft Hotmail itself. You just need to go to https://status.live.com/report and then for Product selection box, select “Outlook.com”. In the radio button that appears, select the specific problem that you are having, then click on Submit button.
NOTE: If the status of Hotmail service is reported as “Running normally” and downrightnow.com is not showing any downtime at all, the problem can be with your browser. This is normally associated with using with Internet Explorer. If you are using Internet Explorer, I suggest that you “Reset Your Internet Explorer Settings“. A good alternative solution is using a different browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.