Windows Live suffers user details identity crisis

the register ^

[Gomez]

Microsoft’s online Windows Live estate was hit by a major server shutdown for about an hour yesterday, after some users of the service complained that they could see other people’s accounts.

“As some of you may have noticed (we heard from you on Twitter!) we had an issue with the Windows Live ID service between 9 and 10AM PST this morning,” admitted Microsoft’s Arthur De Haan yesterday.

“Due to the failure of one server, Windows Live ID logins were failing for some customers, and this increased the load on our remaining servers. We took the problematic server offline and brought a new server into rotation. We identified the root cause and fixed it in less than an hour, but it took a while to resolve the logjam that had built up in the meantime, and to redistribute the load to normal levels.”

We heard from several users affected by the Windows Live security flaw.

"A friend of mine logged into Hotmail through her phone and opened someone else's Hotmail account. She tried twice more and it happened both times, each time opening yet another person's Hotmail," Reg reader Denise Marshall told us.

"This happened when Hotmail's servers were down earlier today but somehow she was able to get on with her phone... I thought this is something really important people should be aware about, especially with online banking and important personal info online."

Microsoft said it would “fully investigate the cause” and apologised for its latest cloud-based failure. In the past few months alone Microsoft has coughed to a series of online user data cockups.

It’s not clear at this stage if Microsoft decided to shutter one of its servers while the company’s wonks attempted to fix the problem, or if the system simply died on its arse.

Microsoft's Windows Live ID system went offline at around 12.30pm New York time, according to user reports. It prevented some people from accessing their Hotmail accounts and other Windows Live services. Redmond said it manages around 460 million online IDs worldwide.

We’ve asked Microsoft to tell us more about what went wrong and whether yesterday morning’s three-hour outage of the firm’s newly launched Windows Phone 7 Series website was related to the Windows Live server blunder.

"The 'Service Unavailable' message [shown on the Windows Phone 7 Series site yesterday] is a well known error message for IIS servers that don't have the correct version of .NET installed or for rights permissions. I don't think that error would be created from too much traffic as it is a message from the web server," noted Reg reader Dave Simmons.

The Register will update this story if we hear back from Microsoft.

[Gomez]

oops

[dools007]

Microsoft is losing the bubble. I’m way past the point of really hating that company. My next computer will not have a Microsoft operating system. Vista has been one pain in the neck.

[tgusa]

Just another example of why ‘cloud-based computing’ is good only for Bill Gates.

[ShadowAce]

[rarestia]

We saw some very interesting behavior on our ADFS connections with MS yesterday. Their answer was related to this “hiccup.”

[HangnJudge]

My next computer will not have a Microsoft operating system.

Use any Unix variant
Linux, Ubuntu, Mac OSX, etc.

Personal choice Mac OSX
But Windows 7 seems to be a VAST improvement over Vista

[martin_fierro]

My next computer will not have a Microsoft operating system. Vista has been one pain in the neck.

With a little back up of your MS Office document files and email, you can switch operating systems, today, for free.

Or try it out first on CD without installing.

[raybbr]

I found "Mint Elyssa" a pain to get started and running. Then I kept getting some sort of error on startup that I could bypass by hitting the escape key at just the right time. <

I took it off my box and put Ubuntu on it. No problems at all.

[ShadowAce]

Use any Unix variant
Linux, Ubuntu, Mac OSX, etc.

Just a small nit to pick--Ubuntu is Linux

[antiRepublicrat]

I think this is tied into XBox Live. I couldn’t watch Netflix on the 360 last night, kept kicking me out because I supposedly didn’t have an XBox Live account.

[HangnJudge]

Just a small nit to pick--Ubuntu is Linux

Hope you wore gloves... /duck

[dools007]

Yo martin_ferro—Thanks for the tip. Present computer is only a couple of years old so I’m not ready to make the jump. I plan to find a geek to set me up when it’s time.

[dools007]

Yo HangnJudge—Thanks for the input. My beef with Microsoft goes beyond its product. I’m not all that enamored with its so-called social conscience nonsense. Doing the right thing always impresses me, but When it is tied to Maxist ideology I draw the line.