Hotmail is down - East coast of USA seeing problems accessing their Hotmail account

Users in the Northeast US have been reporting access to Hotmail services have been down for the past hour.

Other Microsoft websites (and Live.com e-mail) are reachable but extremely slow, including numerous pages at MSN.com.

Those trying to access via Hotmail.com are timing out.

"For several hours now I have received the below faithful screen every time trying to log in to my hotmail account.

It’s kind of strange for a server farm as large as Hotmail to be down like this not to mention twice in one month. Anyone else experiencing this right now?" reports Listen to Taz Rant blog.

The fact that Hotmail is down seems to be wide spread and much longer than the “blip” outages Microsoft usually experiences. Blog entries on the topic are growing as are queries. Time to switch to Gmail.