Live Mail / Hotmail Access Restored!

Finally, I’m back online with my Live mail account.  For those none Live/Hotmail users, there was a slight hiccup in the matrix that took Hotmail/Live mail offline this week.  By midweek, reports were that all was well with the service and that the problems were fixed.  Not quite true in my case.

I was able to log into my Spaces account (the one you’re looking at now) as well as access SkyDrive and other services, but I was unable to check my Live.com mail account.  Login attempts were rejected via the web interface, via Live Mail on my laptop AND on my Live Mail interface on my mobile phone.  So I quickly ruled out my ISP as the culprit.

My immediate thought was that they were having massive power outages in central and south Florida.  Maybe some of the Live/Hotmail servers were affected by that?  Then day two of the rejection messages from my login attempts came and went…still no joy. 

Some poking around ensued and I found Help Central, with a webform that I was able to fill out and let Live know of my inability to send and receive Live mail.  Of course, being the dummy that I am, I initially let the "what email should we send correspondence to?" field remain with the default – my Live email address (DUH!) – then my brain re-engaged and I used another email for the communications exchange.  I received the obligatory "here’s some info to help you figure out if your system is just misconfigured" email, to which I had to reply to get to phase 2 – wherein they actually look and see what the problem is.

By 9:00ish this morning, I’m back online with a few new messages in my Inbox.  Now I need to send a message out to the friends and relatives to let them know that I might have missed some messages that were sent in the last few days…

Doug White