<p>Microsoft has blamed overheating equipment at a data center for a brief outage that hit the Hotmail and Outlook.com email services last March 12.</p><p>In a blog post, Microsoft Vice President for Test and Service Engineering for Windows Services Arthur de Haan said a firmware update in one of the data centers failed "in an unexpected way."</p><p>"This failure resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the data center. This spike was significant enough before it was mitigated that it caused our safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the data center," de Haan said.</p><p>Such safeguards "prevented access to mailboxes housed on these servers and also prevented any other pieces of our infrastructure to automatically failover and allow continued access," he added.</p><p><a href="http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/299597/scitech/technology/overheating-equipment-is-culprit-in-hotmail-outlook-disruption-microsoft">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57574270-75/microsoft-pins-hotmail-outlook-outage-on-hot-data-center/">Microsoft pins Hotmail, Outlook outage on hot data center</a> (CNET)</p><p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/the-great-hotmail-outlook-outage-of-2013-continues-as-downtime-passes-12-hour/">The Great Hotmail, Outlook Outage Of 2013 Continues As Downtime Passes 12 ...</a> (TechCrunch)</p><p><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/2030836/microsoft-blames-outlook-hotmail-outage-on-overheated-servers-apologizes.html">Microsoft blames Outlook, Hotmail outage on overheated servers, apologizes</a> (PCWorld)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dX_-iUxcdXsC08M-KjBarVyIeCt0M&ned=us">98 additional articles.</a></p>