Hotmail was down for the past 8~10 hours, and has just came back to service with a big surprise:

All accounts were upgraded to 1GB storage space!

The downtime, which was a bit too long for the core MSN service, was apparently used to perform the upgrade. I’ve checked several Hotmail accounts and looks like the upgrade went through all accounts regardless of country or account age.

Microsoft has paid its Hotmail storage volume poor attention since the early beginning. Free Hotmail accounts used to start with 2 MBs of storage space and were later expanded to 25 MBs. Microsoft’s main competitors, Google and Yahoo!, have been continuously increasing their storage capacities and upgrading/adding to their services as well. Google currently features 2785 MBs of storage capacity while Yahoo! features 1000 MBs. Yahoo! has also launched a new AJAX-based mail interface recently. Although still in Beta, the new Yahoo! Mail Beta looks very promising.

Instead of working out its Hotmail service, Microsoft decided to launch a new Live Mail service, which was coldly welcomed by Hotmail users.

The new Live Mail was introduced in Beta stage, while (functionally-speaking) was pre-alpha! Live Mail lacked core web-mail features and didn’t even work for some browsers. Hotmail users have been invited to upgrade their accounts to Live Mail but only few tried and retained the upgrade.

Microsoft later decided to feature 1000 MBs of storage space for its Live Mail users, but looks like the majority of users didn’t bother.

During the past year, tricks have crossed the Internet on how to increase Hotmail’s storage capacity to 250 and 1000 MBs. The 250 MB upgrade, which I previously posted about, did actually work. The 1000 MB upgrade, however, was merely a trick to fool Hotmail to upgrade the storage space by submitting a deceitful request to join Live Mail. The trick did work, but few days later Hotmail used to perform the upgrade to Live Mail. Upon downgrading, the 25/250 MB capacity was restored.

Anyways, those tricks are now history as all Hotmail accounts should shortly be upgraded to 1GB. Rumors say that Microsoft is already planning for a further 2GB, or even a 4GB upgrade, which I think is too good to be true! (ma ba7o6 be themte :P)