Business

Microsoft says lost Hotmail e-mails now restored

Posted January 02, 2011 10:00 pm

Associated Press

NEW YORK — Microsoft Corp. said Monday that it has resolved a glitch that caused thousands of Hotmail users to temporarily lose all of their e-mails.

A chorus of frantic people had posted complaints to the Redmond, Wash.-based company's online message board over the weekend, saying their e-mails had disappeared. In some cases, e-mails were mistakenly sent to their deleted mail folders.

Chris Jones, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Live business, said in a blog post Monday that 17,355 people lost their e-mails starting on Thursday. By Sunday evening, the messages had been restored.

Though his team has identified what went wrong, Jones did not disclose any details.

"As with all incidents like this, we will fully investigate the cause and will take steps to prevent this from happening again," he wrote.

Hotmail is the world's most popular free Web-based e-mail service, with about 360 million users, according to Web traffic measurement group comScore Inc.

The online Hotmail message board has racked up 492 pages of complaints about lost and deleted e-mails dating back to early November.

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