Update: [5 December 2005] Comcast Support says, “Over the past several days MSN.com and Hotmail.com have experienced difficulties receiving email from some domains, including Comcast.net. This situation has improved considerably over the past 48 hours. If you have been unable to send mail to a specific MSN.com or Hotmail.com address from your Comcast.net email address, please try again now.” The unidentified virus in the following article that brought Hotmail to its knees is reputed to be the notorious Sober-Z, a worm that attacks only Windows systems via email attachments.
Since 29 November, millions of Comcast subscribers have been unable to send email to MSN or Hotmail. Comcast reports:
Emails sent from Comcast.net subscribers to MSN or Hotmail.com email accounts will be denied and the subscriber will receive the error “550 permit denied”. This is caused by a problem on Microsoft’s end caused by a virus. Microsoft is actively working to correct the issue. No ETC was supplied. Abuse will continue to monitor the situation and updates will be posted when available.Subscribers that have attempted to send emails to MSN/Hotmail prior to the block may receive the error message “Delivery status: Failed. Message could not be delivered to the domain - Hotmail.com. Failed to accept the recipients. MTA Response: 551″ today as a result of the current block. Abuse is tracking the issue.
An employee for a Canadian ISP reports on BroadbandReports’ forum that Cogeco has experienced similar problems with Hotmail, noting delivery delays ranging from 3 to 20+ hours. Further, Cogeco’s hireling says Hotmail servers respond to 4 out of 5 messages with Connection Refused or Conection Timed Out. Through it all, the Cogeco-ite says Hotmail’s status page proclaims, “there are no known network issues,” which, he retorts, “is simply not true.”
If it weren’t for Cogeco, we wouldn’t know who to believe.
See Also:
See for yourself at BroadbandReports.
13 comments
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December 2nd, 2005 at 12:37 pm
phil
Right now, all of hotmail.com’s MX servers are very unreliable. One minute, I can make an SMTP connection, the next minute, the server’s unresponsive. Think they installed OneCare?
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:48 pm
Noc
makes you wonder if THEY use windows hahahahaha, they should be using linux then they wouldnt have half the problems lol
December 2nd, 2005 at 4:17 pm
bob
Yeah, everybody knows there are no known problems of any sort on any *nix systems. Disregard the fact that every _current_ XP machine I have has close to 100% uptime, that’s an illusion.
December 3rd, 2005 at 5:01 am
Norm
Uptime: 10:10am up 218 days, 2:51, load average: 0.24, 0.04, 0.01
Beat that XP lover, how do you manage to apply patches without rebooting?
December 3rd, 2005 at 6:10 am
whitedog
;) ‘Uptime’ is just not the time from switching pc on in the morning and turning off at night, mismatch of vocabulary within os and dos-worlds
December 3rd, 2005 at 7:36 am
mshater
Speaking of uptime, I have had Linux systems go way beyond anything Windows is capable of.
One went a year and a half without reboot or shutdown. I decided to move to a newer version or it would have kept going.
Another went to 400 days and then its uptime clock started over and was still running when I left the company where this was several months later. It would have been even higher but one of the Windows droids I worked with couldn’t tell the what the power switch was and shut it off accidently one day.
I have NEVER seen Windows even come close to this. High uptimes are normal for Linux.
December 3rd, 2005 at 8:46 am
Heyitsme
Ugh..the old “Linux is better than XP nonsense. When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton said “because that’s where the money’s at”. With a user percentage in the 90’s range, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that hackers and other malcontents would target MS products. That doesn’t absolve MS. But it certainly explains the patches. Anyone who thinks that ANY OS is perfect or impenetrable is foolish at best. MS has won the battle of the desktop (if there ever was one). If the ‘nix offerings were that compelling, MS would be history. Geez, they can’t even convince enough people when it’s free! That says it all. Stop the dopey jealousy. Enjoy your Linux flavors, and tip your cap to the king. You’ll always be known as “fringe players”. Case closed.
December 3rd, 2005 at 9:14 am
Tom
Linux is not a fringe player in the server world. Linux is a huge target on the internet. You will have to search elsewhere for excusses for Gates & co. But I do remember reading some years back that hotmail actually does run on some flavor us *nix ironically.
Maybe all the mouse clickers are having trouble running them?
Who knows.
December 3rd, 2005 at 10:52 am
NoOneYouKnow
Hotmail used to be the worlds largest installation of FreeBSD. But that was many years ago. They fully migrated to Windows on their Front End as of about late 2002, and their Back End (which ran on Solaris powered E4500s) was fully migrated to Win2K3 as of late 2004. They actually had quite a few Unix Sys Admins on the team, who either left or were allowed to retrain onto Win2K3.
December 3rd, 2005 at 11:03 am
weby
Well.. They used to run Some variant of BSD Unix before being taken over by Microsoft. After that the switched to windows and there was a nice document on the transition posted with comments on things like needing much more capacity as not even Microsoft knew what services and such could be stripped to acheive a as small as possible ammount of running processes as dependancies were not documented.
December 3rd, 2005 at 11:18 am
Belandrew
The main switchover is described here:
http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html
December 3rd, 2005 at 2:42 pm
GP
Comcast has gotten onto the Real Time Black Hole list at SORBS.net
If Hotmail is using SORBS then the connectivity with Comcast has nothing to do with a problem at Hotmail.
January 25th, 2006 at 10:25 am
Mike
I still cannot connect to any of the mx servers hotmail has from my comcast address. I’m not getting a 550 error message or anything, it is like I’m firewalled off from them.