Microsoft fixing Hotmail

Microsoft said on Friday it had restored access to its Windows Live services, including Hotmail, for most customers after a major glitch that took them offline for several hours.
Microsoft said in a statement it became aware of the problem at about 0300 GMT. Services started to be restored at 0530 GMT.
The company had said on its Windows Live blog it was actively working to resolve the outage, and in an update posted at 0649 GMT said services had been restored for most customers.
"If you have been trying to use Hotmail, SkyDrive or our other Live services in the last couple of hours you may have noticed problems accessing our services," Chris Jones, a Microsoft executive, said on the blog.
Hotmail is the world's most-used online email system, with more than 360 million users. SkyDrive is a cloud-computing service mainly for small businesses that stores data and delivers it over the Web.

Microsoft's Mobile Software Gets HTC

Microsoft's new Windows Phone platform won instant support from major manufacturers on Wednesday when China's ZTE and Taiwan's HTC Corp pledged to launch smartphones running the software. The U.S. software giant had stepped up its push into the cellphone market a day earlier with the launch of the new Windows Phone software, code-named Mango. It hopes a host of new features will help it close the gap on smartphone leaders Google Inc and Apple Inc. Microsoft has struggled for years to gain support from mobile phone manufacturers. All vendors in total sold just 1.6 million Windows Phones last quarter, giving it a market share of below 2 percent. Google and Apple together control more than 50 percent of the smartphone market. Windows Phone got a major boost in February when Nokia, the largest phone vendor by volume, said it would swap its own Symbian platform for Windows Phone. On Wednesday ZTE said it would roll out smartphones running updated Microsoft software later this year in Europe, and in 2012 in the United States. And Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC plans to bring out some models based on Microsoft's new software, its Chief Executive Peter Chou told Reuters on the fringes of an internet conference in Paris. "We are very committed to Windows phone products," he said. Analysts said Microsoft needed all the support it could get from handset vendors. "Increased support and competition can only help Windows Phone. It desperately needs more aggressively priced devices and a substantial promotional push to coincide with the Mango release," said Geoff Blaber, an analyst with CCS Insight. ZTE, which is known for its agressive entrance into the telecom equipment market, could help to boost Microsoft's position among cheaper smartphones. ZTE expects to ship more than 80 million handsets this year, up by a third from last year's 60 million units, an executive told Reuters earlier this year. Key markets for ZTE's handsets include China, Europe and the United States. In the fourth quarter of 2010, ZTE became the fourth-largest handset maker by unit shipments globally, ranking behind Nokia, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Inc, market research group IDC said.