<p>Microsoft has said that outages on its Outlook and Hotmail services were caused by an overheating datacentre that took itself offline to stop problems spreading further.</p><p>The incident occurred on Wednesday and left scores of customers without access to their email accounts.</p><p>In a blog post written by vice president of test and service engineering, Arthur de Haan, the firm gave more insight into the cause of the issue.</p><p>"On 12 March, in one physical region of one of our datacenters, we performed our regular process of updating the firmware on a core part of our physical plant. This is an update that had been done successfully previously, but failed in this specific instance in an unexpected way," he said.</p><p><a href="http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2254808/microsoft-outlook-and-hotmail-outages-caused-by-overheating-datacentre">Keep reading...</a></p>