Microsoft Hotmail hiccuped around the New Year holiday, resulting in approximately 17,000 users finding some or all of their messages missing.

At the time, Microsoft officials declined to comment on what happened. But on January 6, they shared more details about the causes of the recent Hotmail outage that started on December 30. From a post on the “Inside Windows Live” blog:

“On December 30th, we had an error in a script that inadvertently removed the directory records of a small number of real user accounts along with a set of test accounts. Please note that the email messages and folders of impacted users were not deleted; only their inbox location in the directory servers was removed. Therefore when they logged in, a new mailbox was automatically created for them on a new storage server that didn’t contain their old messages and folders. This is why the accounts received the “Welcome to Hotmail” message.”

Microsoft shares details of holiday Hotmail outage | ZDNet

Somehow my emails were preserved - well I think?

BUT - this news has lost some of my confidence with the service now. Hotmail was my first email account yeeeears ago - moved on and came back to integrate it with Thunderbird and so far so good.

I really don't want to be reactionary and create a new account somewhere else