👉 Hotmail, now known as Outlook.com, experienced significant technical issues and user frustration primarily due to persistent "fumes" or intermittent outages that affected email delivery and performance. These issues were often characterized by emails not arriving, messages being garbled or missing attachments, and slow response times, which could stem from server overloads, network problems, or software bugs. The term "fumes" aptly captures the unpredictable and often frustrating experience users faced, as their emails would sometimes arrive but be corrupted, or take an inordinate amount of time to process, leading to a generally unreliable and stressful email experience.
