Microsoft's Hotmail flicks finger at UK students

Microsoft’s Hotmail and Outlook Live servers keep getting stuck on a spamming loop that is locking many students and teaching staff at UK universities out of the firm’s email service.

On 18 March, Microsoft admitted that Hotmail and Outlook Live users at the University of Bath and the University of Manchester were unable to receive emails for the best part of the day due to a cockup with the junk email filtering system.

Now The Register is getting reports from readers that suggest similar problems at Bournemouth, De Montfort, Exeter, Portsmouth and Strathclyde universities, all of which are currently blocking hotmail.co.uk addresses because of a spamming mail server.

We’ve asked Microsoft to tell us what’s gone wrong, but at time of writing it hadn’t gotten back to us with comment.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has suffered major technical difficulties affecting Hotmail users based at Blighty universities.

In May last year thousands of students and university staff were unable to contact Hotmail users because of an unidentified network fault.