The frustrations of mass market, web based services, Hotmail is the poster child

I know we dribble all over ourselves about the cloud and web based services. Isn’t it grand to be able to access stuff anywhere anytime. But there is a deep, dark side to the web based world we are living in. That is when something goes wrong.

We have all probably dealt with this one way or another. These web based services are built to scale to millions, tens of millions and more users. When they work they are great, when they don’t though, God help you.  Try getting support from Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, Facebook or any of their brethren.

I first ran into this when my blog was hacked a few years back. I was locked out of my typepad, go daddy, hotmail and yahoo accounts and couldn’t get anyone there to do a damn thing about it following their usual support procedures.

Finally I had to resort to calling people I knew at each of these companies to get my problem resolved. But the average person would be up the creek.

That was a few years ago, but it is no better today. Today I experienced a similar story with Hotmail. I use hotmail for my personal mail and my The CISO Group mail for business. I get a ton of email on Hotmail though.  I noticed that I had not received anything though since early this morning. That is very unusual due to all of the Google alerts and other notices I receive in hotmail.

Both my iPhone and Outlook showed I was connected to Hotmail, there was just no new mail. I logged into Windows Live and it showed the same thing. I sent an email from my CISO Group mailbox to my hotmail box and it never made it there. I then sent a hotmail mail to my CISO Group and it came through in a matter of seconds.

So the problem seems to be that I can send and receive mail sent from within my hotmail account, but can’t receive anything from outside of it.  That is a problem. I get withdrawals without my email.

I logged into Hotmail help and followed the link to support. That is when I knew that something was very wrong. It took like 2 or 3 trys to pull up live support. When I did it took a few minutes for the page to load. Other web sites are running fine. Obviously there is a something rotten in Denmark with Hotmail today.

Do you think someone there has the sense to post something and let people know? Of course not. Is there anyway of contacting anyone? Of course not. Is this acceptable service? OF COURSE NOT!

So know I have to go through my contacts and go call someone from Microsoft who might know someone from Hotmail. I may get lucky or I may just have to wait until they figure out what is wrong and do something about it.

In the meantime mass market, cloud based service will never win until uptime issues like this and a better level of support are in place!