TORONTO - Bell Canada's Sympatico email subscribers were among the casualties of a global outage Tuesday at the system that hosts Microsoft's free Hotmail email 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 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,'' 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 email device.
An attempt by Pakistan to block access to YouTube last week ended up causing most of the world's Internet users to lose access to the video-sharing site, which is owned by Internet giant Google Inc.
Pakistan had ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube, because of anti-Islamic movies on the site. The block was meant to cover only Pakistan, but ended up extending to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, and lasted up to two hours in some cases.
Earlier this month, a major outage of the BlackBerry wireless email service swept across Canada and the United States, affecting millions of subscribers who depend on the hand-held devices for up-to-the-minute communications on a daily basis.
Waterloo, Ont.-based Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry and works through wireless carriers around the world to deliver the service, apologized for the inconvenience, but did not explain the exact cause or extent of the outage.
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 email accounts, which are included with Bell's Internet subscriptions, have since been integrated with the Microsoft platform.
"We use the MSN platform for our email 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.''
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.
