Microsoft confirms it has resolved 17,355 Hotmail missing e-mail accounts

By Tom Warren, on 4th Jan 11 5:24 am with 2 Comments

Microsoft said on Monday that it has resolved an issue affecting 17,355 Hotmail accounts.

A large number of Hotmail users complained on December 31 that their e-mail inboxes had been wiped. Microsoft confirmed the issue as a result of issues from load balancing servers. Microsoft spokesperson Chris Jones issued the following statement:

Beginning on December 30th we had an issue with Windows Live Hotmail that impacted 17,355 accounts. Customers impacted temporarily lost the contents of their mailbox through the course of mailbox load balancing between servers.  We identified the root cause and restored mail to the impacted accounts as of yesterday evening, January 2nd.  As with all incidents like this, we will fully investigate the cause and will take steps to prevent this from happening again. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused to you, our customers and partners.

Hotmail users were understandably frustrated by the issues. Some users setup a Facebook page to complain about the recent issues.

  • nestortrv

    as today I still have some of my old emails loss I hope this get solved too

  • hmgone

    Same here – one of my hotmail accounts that has 5 years of emails in it has been cleared, and all that’s left is a new ‘welcome to hotmail’ that was sent automatically when I logged on tonight.