Hello Fellow Technophiles,
I would like to start out by saying that I am not sharing this to offer evidence that Apple is superior to Microsoft even though that is CLEARLY the case. I am merely sharing information…
Yesterday, the 7th of March, Microsoft had a major service outage that affected many of their services. This included the Outlook email service (which includes Hotmail), Office 365 (their cloud-based Office service), the Xbox Live gaming service, and Skype. These services were completely down or had limited functionality for hours.
Normally this would not affect me in any way as I do not use any of these services, but I was working with someone who was trying to set up her Hotmail account on her new Mac. She was sure that the password was correct, but it would not let us sign into this account in the Mac Mail program. I double-checked all of the IMAP and SMTP settings and these were all correct, so I was sure that the password was in fact the issue. My suspicion seemed to be confirmed when we tried to log into Hotmail.com and the password didn’t work. The next step was to reset the password, but this process kept failing. At this point, I started to get suspicious and a quick Google search revealed the outage.
The lesson here is that if an online service does not seem to be working correctly, it is definitely worth looking into whether or not that service is down before diving into more in-depth troubleshooting. Apple maintains a page where you can check on all of its service is one place. Click here to see the current service status.
Thanks for reading!