Bell Canada's Sympatico e-mail subscribers were among the casualties of a global outage Tuesday at the system that hosts Microsoft's free Hotmail e-mail and other web services that are run by the U.S.-based software giant.
Jason Laszlo, a Bell Canada spokesman, said the company — which offers the Sympatico Internet service in Ontario and Quebec and has millions of subscribers — first noticed problems with Microsoft's outage just before 9 a.m. Tuesday.
“We noticed at its worst that about 80 per cent of our Sympatico users weren't able to log in,” said Mr. Laszlo, who said the problem was with Microsoft's MSN platform, which is host to both the Hotmail and Sympatico services.
Just before 5 p.m. ET, only about 40 per cent of Sympatico customers were still affected and “and it keeps improving hourly,” Mr. Laszlo said.
At the moment, “we don't have an (estimated time) for a complete resolution, but the system is improving.”
The Hotmail outage was the latest in a series of technical problems that have affected various communications services around the world in recent weeks, from the YouTube video-sharing site to use of Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry e-mail device.
At Microsoft and Bell Canada, the two companies integrated their respective web portals about four years ago — combining two of Canada's most-visited websites into sympatico.msn.ca. The Sympatico e-mail accounts, which are included with Bell's Internet subscriptions, have since been integrated with the Microsoft platform.
“We use the MSN platform for our e-mail as it allows a degree of flexibility for our customers,” said Laszlo.
He said Bell Canada, which is the country's largest phone company, doesn't divulge how many Sympatico subscribers it has, but said there would be thousands in Ontario and Quebec.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the problem was due to an unspecified technical glitch that prevented users from accessing services that require a Microsoft login. Those include the Xbox Live video game community site and the Windows Live Messenger instant messaging program.
“The issue is purely impacting the login process for customers and largely does not impact customers who were already logged in,” said Microsoft spokeswoman Samantha McManus in a statement.
“We have made significant progress in decreasing the number of customers currently affected since initial reports, but the issue has not yet been completely resolved.”
Mr. Laszlo assured Bell's customers that “this is an unfortunate outage and we're supporting MSN in getting it resolved as quickly as possible.”
Microsoft confirmed the problem was international in scope, but did not say how many people were affected or when a complete resolution was expected.
