Microsoft's Hotmail is down in the Northeast. Other Microsoft websites are sporadically reachable but extremely slow for many users. I'm located in Boston and cannot connect to Hotmail or Live.com. The MSN network status page for Hotmail claims there are no network issues at this time, but that's clearly incorrect. This is the second major service outage this week, following Pakistan's takedown of YouTube over the weekend. Is Hotmail down for you? Let us know in the comments. A Microsoft's flack's PR-speak comment is below.

The general consensus among network operators is that Pakistan knocked YouTube offline by accident. Pakistan Telecom, the ISP put in charge of blocking YouTube in Pakistan, tried to use a standard filter to redirect Pakistani traffic, but ended up redirecting all global YouTube requests to itself because of insecure routing protocols. If that's not geeky enough for you, grab the technical details from Ars Technica.

Last week, conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh begged Apple CEO Steve Jobs for bug fixes on problems he'd been having for months. Finally, an Apple muckety-muck reached out to El-Rushbo:

Wired has resurrected an old tradition: Get the geeks in the server room to explain why computers fail. This time, it's CondeNet CTO Rajiv Pant, explaining why Wired uses Amazon's S3 storage service despite this morning's breakdown. But last time around? Breaking down walls between the engineering quad and the newsroom resulted in ... Paul Boutin. Don't say you weren't warned.

Amazon's S3 Web-storage service, favored by startups too poor to afford their own hard drives or too technically inept to set them up, went down for about two hours earlier today, slowing down graphics on services like Twitter and Tumblr, SAI reports. "Not a big deal," Tumblr founder David Karp told us. "A reminder for a lot of services that redundancy beyond Amazon is still necessary," he said. Maybe not for you, David. But I'm lost without my morning dose of Nevver.

Conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh is a Mac user. But not a happy one. Today he put out a plea to Apple CEO Steve Jobs to fix a bug that's been plaguing him for months.

Google's YouTube was down for as much as two hours this afternoon, according to tipsters' reports. Good thing it had major advertisers cooped up in a Manhattan nightclub, rather than at their desks, clicking "play" on clips to no avail. Likewise, unexpected outbursts of productivity swept the Valley until the site came back around 6 p.m. YouTube's last major outage was in August 2006, before Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and showered it with bandwidth and servers. One wonders what YouTube's excuse is this time. And how much money Google avoided losing for every minute YouTube was offline.

Raelyn Campbell wants $54 million from Best Buy. She bought a $1,100 laptop and a $300 warranty for it from Best Buy in 2006. The next May, the laptop's on/off switch broke and Campbell brought it into the store for repairs. The store told her she'd have it back in two to six weeks. That didn't happen.

Poor Research in Motion. First the iPhone shows up and makes its BlackBerry look old and busted. Now, it really is old and busted. RIM is experiencing a "disruption of service" affecting all wireless carriers in North America. BlackBerry users could "experience difficulty" using data capabilities like email and web connectivity on their phones. RIM has called the event a "critical severity outage" which started this afternoon and affects enterprise clients and "users of the Americas network." The company has no estimate for when service will be restored. Quick, call a meeting — people will pay attention for lack of anything else to do. (Photo by decaf)

In a repeat of last week's failed launch of lifecasting service Yahoo Live, Yahoo's new online finance show Tech Ticker has launched with a broken page. If the millions of users exposed to it could see it — the show is prominently placed throughout the site — they'd learn that it is hosted by BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy and TheStreet.com veteran Aaron Task, with contributions from the likes of Paul Kedrosky and Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget (interviewed in one of the first episodes). After being down for more than 20 minutes, Tech Ticker seems to be back up ... sort of. The interview with Blodget is viewable on the Tech Ticker website but now the embed code seems to be broken. How much money is this company worth again? If they find an engineer to fix it, here's the clip:

Yesterday, First Round Capital VC Jeff Kopelman posted to his blog what he thought was clear evidence that Yahoo employees are planning a mass exodus. Through his venture firm, he bought Facebook ads with the message "Leaving Yahoo?" in November and again this week after Microsoft announced its intentions to buy the company. Clickthrough rates on the ads were up 300 percent this time over last, Kopelman said. What Kopelman didn't say was that this time the ads included Facebook profile pictures of current Yahoo employees. The pictures appeared because the Yahoos had joined First Round Capital's Facebook group — not because they'd left the company.

"Guess what, you're losing your bashing privileges!" A boy using the name broncfn90 yells at the YouTube commenters who ripped him apart. All he did was come on this site to give his opinions on the Denver Broncos! And they all disrespected him! But seriously, this poor kid had explained on video that his face has been half-paralyzed since birth, and the commenters still came at him. Now his videos (which were reposted by his detractors after he deleted his account) are making the rounds at 4chan, that pit at the bottom of the Internet, and broncfn90 might become a mini-Chris Crocker. Come see a boy gone mad. Plus a bonus video from the vaults, of a teen girl crying over YouTube comments. The takeaway, as if you didn't know: YouTube users are scum and reading their comments will turn you into a whiny pile of impotent rage.

Rackspace management called Tumblr's David Karp yesterday and pleaded for mercy. The Web-hosting service even offered to cut bandwidth chargeds from $2 a gigabyte down to 40 cents. (Other Rackspace customers, take note.) Didn't work. Karp, who runs today's favorite blogging tool for emo hipsters, dropped the hammer anyway. In the end, he tells us, it wasn't even Rackspace's winter and fall full of fail that led him to quit the service.

Some users of Twitter, the addictive microblogging service, noticed that it abruptly stopped working for them over the past 24 hours. The reason? An abrupt switch away from Joyent, the company which hosted — past tense — Twitter's servers. Companies change Web hosts all the time, and the moves are always wrenching. But Joyent and Twitter had just happily announced that they were working together to keep Twitter up through this Sunday's Super Bowl.

You know those distorted letters and numbers you have to retype to log into websites? They're called captchas, for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. One thing they're good for is preventing spambots from signing up for Yahoo email accounts. Or at least that's one thing they used to be good for.

Facebook can't afford to spurn marketing firms like New York's Attention PR. But it does. Last Friday, Attention PR built a Facebook page for a client — a new kind of souped-up profile that can be advertised on Facebook. Though not as well known as Beacon, Facebook Pages are part of Mark Zuckerberg's once-every-hundred-years change in media he promised in launching SocialAds. But as of Monday evening the page remains unindexed by Facebook's search engine, rendering it essentially invisible. That's a problem for a client who wanted immediate results. Isn't that the whole point of advertising online?

After users submit a story, image or video to Digg, the site asks users to review similar submissions and make sure the new item isn't a duplicate of an existing article being voted for on the site. The tool is a marvel of modern precision. For example, notice how, in this accompanying screen shot, Digg's algorithm pairs a story on USB 3.0 with one on how "Men Aren't Washing Their Hands in The Restroom." Admit it. As a mere human, you never would have made the connection. Click to expand the image.

Silicon Valley understands competition, even schadenfreude. So you'll forgive Rackspace competitors if they're just a tad gleeful at the managed hosting firm's failures of late. "It was very interesting (and quite a pleasure) to read your blog about [Rackspace] Well done!" one such competitor writes in an email, here attached as image (click to expand). He goes on: "Would you mind forwarding this email (or making an introduction via email) to Charles Forman with Iminlikewithyou.com?" Well, we'll see do what we can do. Charles?

Last night Pownce attempted to launch live to the public, but instead launched FAIL, a tipster tells us in an email with this error message attached. No, this tipster is not Uncov's Ted Dziuba, the Leah Culver-despising hero of all real programmers. We ended all that. Nevertheless, Dziuba's definition of the site remains useful.

Managed Web hosting firm Rackspace took out Tumblr, the trendy blogging site, last night, 37signals on Friday, a bunch of U.K. sites in December, and most of the websites you care about last November. Tumblr announced plans to quit the service this morning and at least one other startup customer — Charles Forman of Iminlikewithyou — doesn't blame him. Here are Forman's four reasons why, in his words, "Rackspace f—-ing sucks."