Microsoft was definitely aware of the outage by the time it was afternoon, and their engineers have been hard at work on the outage, with more or less settling the issue in due time. Microsoft’s recent statement on the outage read, “Hotmail and Outlook.com experienced a short-term incident that caused a small percentage of customers not to be able to access their email. We worked quickly to resolve the issue, and service is now restored to normal; we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this caused our customers.” No reason was given for the outage, but we are ruling out being hacked by the numerous countries that are out to crush the Great Satan.