As reported in the usual places this morning, Microsoft is experiencing a widespread outage of at least one of its major online services, including Windows Live Hotmail. It looked like the West Coast wasn't suffering from it early this morning, but that has since changed. I've been unable to access Hotmail for the past four hours.

Microsoft has issued a statement saying it is investigating the problem, will fix it ASAP and is sorry for anyone put out by the outage.

I was reading Ina Fried's interview with Microsoft Server and Tools chief Bob Muglia just before checking my Hotmail again and was interested to see that Microsoft is using the forthcoming Windows Server 2008 internally for "a good part of the Windows Live servers." As Mary Jo Foley notes, an unfortunate coincidence. But let's wait and see what Microsoft says is the cause of the outage. It could be any number of things, right?

Update, 12:45 p.m.: A bit more on the scope of the outage. The AP is confirming that it's international in scope and that other services that require a Live ID to log in, such as the Xbox Live video game network, aren't working either.

Update, 1:40 p.m.: Hotmail is working again for me and seems pretty snappy.

Update, 3:30 p.m.: Everything's hunky dory now. Check out this post for Microsoft's all-clear statement, which has a bit of additional detail on what happened.