If you’re a former Hotmail user, you might be aware that Microsoft (News - Alert) is migrating the accounts over to Outlook. If that’s the case, you might want to check and see if your email is working. Up until recently, it probably wasn’t.

Reports are coming in from all over the Web that Hotmail was experiencing downtime for up to three hours. Suffice to say, that’s far longer than most can or will wait to check their e-mail.

This also apparently affects SkyDrive, which is “experiencing issues with adding, editing, or removing files.” There was previously a similar problem with Calendar, but that seems to have been resolved

The problems plaguing Hotmail and Outlook are described as challenges related to displaying the e-mails, since being unable to do that does defeat the entire purpose of both. The assumption is that it’s a service disruption, with people stating that all of Microsoft’s cloud products are currently behaving badly. Hopefully this issue will not affect all of them, as its resolution took some time.

According to a statement from Microsoft, the issue is affecting only a small number of customers. Judging by the complaints on Twitter (News - Alert) however, it’s a very vocal “small number.” According to the status report, the issues have been resolved and Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Outlook are now running normally, although some customers might still be experiencing some problems.

This won’t come close to breaking Microsoft, but it still doesn’t reflect well on the migration from Hotmail to Outlook. Still, if it turns into a learning experience to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future, then there will be some plus side to it. The full cause has yet to be reported, but hopefully there will be a way to prevent it from happening again as well.