RIP Hotmail: Microsoft migrates last users to Outlook.com

Microsoft has transferred all 300 million active Hotmail accounts to its new Outlook.com web mail service, effectively marking the end of the 16-year service.

Hotmail users will retain their @hotmail.com email addresses, but as of last night heading to the Hotmail homepage will see them redirected to the Outlook.com login screen. Whereas previously they had the option to revert their Outlook account back to a Hotmail one, the change is now permanent and they will have to adapt to the new, minimal user interface.

Outlook.com first started accepting users last July, gaining 60 million users in the six months it took to leave its beta stage. Microsoft had always planned to migrate Hotmail users over to the new service, but doing so required a mammoth operation – in order to make sure that every person’s mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade, 150 million gigabytes of data had to be migrated between servers.

Things went smoothly for the most part, although both Hotmail and Outlook.com were hit with multiple outages and some Hotmail users were locked out of their accounts while they were moved over, but hopefully Microsoft has ironed out the kinks.

Microsoft’s Dick Craddock took to an official company blog to thank users for sticking with the service. “We want to give a huge ‘Thank you’ to all of you who have supported Hotmail over the years, for some of you, that’s going back as far as 1996. It has been an amazing journey and we’ve been honored to provide you with a great mail experience for many years.”

According to Craddock, Outlook.com now has 400 million active users, which he hopes will “”come to love it even more than they loved Hotmail”.