A temporary outage yesterday left Hotmail users somewhat panic-stricken as they were met with a message claiming that their e-mail inbox didn't exist and then forwarded to a sign up page. The outage prompted Microsoft to quickly release a blog post Thursday night ensuring that users' inboxes and emails were safe. The cause was a network issue during routine maintenance that was discovered shortly after.

"We have corrected the problem and you should be able to access your Hotmail and other Windows Live services again," the company stated on its blog Thursday night. Nevertheless users complained of login issues persisting well into the morning. As of 2:25 AM EST Thursday, Microsoft said all Hotmail services were back to normal and the outage was resolved.

If you are still experiencing obscurities with your Hotmail account, Microsoft encourages you to first seek answers via Windows Live Help, after which you should contact the support team directly if you are still having problems.