<p>The importance of keeping data centers cool has been getting some attention lately, particularly in light of some innovative new ways of keeping servers running under optimal temperatures.</p><p>Microsoft this week experienced what can happen things get too hot. Users of its Hotmail and new Outlook.com e-mail services, along with its SkyDrive file-hosting service, were out of luck for 16 hours March 12-13 during a service disruption the company blamed on a hot data center.</p><p>The outage hit at 4:35 p.m. EDT March 12 after the company performed a routine firmware update in its data center facility, according to a blog post by Microsoft Vice President Arthur de Haan. Although the update had been done before without a hitch, de Haan wrote, it "failed in this specific instance in an unexpected way."</p><p>The result: "a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the data center," he wrote.</p><p><a href="http://gcn.com/blogs/pulse/2013/03/overheated-servers-take-down-hotmail.aspx">Keep reading...</a></p>