My wife just tried to log on to her Hotmail account, but no dice. A few minutes later a GeekWire reader sent me an email — not from their Hotmail account obviously — indicating an outage at both MSN and Hotmail.

It is unclear how widespread the problem is, but Twitter is erupting with a stream of users complaining about the outage.

Let us know if you are having problems, and if there’s a potential fix. We are reaching out to Microsoft to check on what the issue is.

The company just posted this message on Twitter about the outage:

We’re aware of an outage impacting Hotmail, SkyDrive, and our other properties. We are actively working to resolve this issue. More to come.

MSN also confirmed the outage in a Tweet.

We’re currently experiencing an outage at www.msn.com We’re aware of the issue and working to resolve it. Thanks for your patience.

This is the second high-profile outage for Microsoft’s cloud-based services in the past month, following an outage of Office 365 last month. (In fact, one reader says Office 365 also is out tonight. Let us know if you’re experiencing problems with that service).

Not a good day for Microsoft’s cloud services.

Update 9:45 p.m.: In a blog post, Microsoft says that it has restored service to Hotmail and SkyDrive users.

We believe we have restored service for all customers at this time. We will continue our investigation into the root cause of these issues and post an update following our investigation. Again we appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience.

Update 10:40 p.m.: Microsoft issued this message on its Hotmail Twitter account about 15 minutes ago.

We’re rolling out a fix that we believe will resolve issues with Hotmail, SkyDrive, and our other Live properties. Thanks for your patience!

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