Is the Hotmail layout broken for you?

A few days ago I noticed the Hotmail layout was completely broken. Figuring it's probably a bad update I just closed it thinking it would be fixed in a few hours. A day later it was still broken and I decided to clear my cache/etc with no joy.

Hotmail worked fine in Firefox so I made a post about it on the Hotmail help forums figuring it was an IE10 beta issue, but didn't get any responses. I decided to investigate it myself.

Turns out they've done some kind of update to the HTTPS services, probably to enable TLS1.1/1.2, but instead broke it completely. The reason the layout looks odd is the CSS files were failing to be retrieved over the HTTPS connection.

If you're experiencing this problem you're probably using a browser with TLS 1.1/1.2 enabled, the simple solution for now is to disable that feature. In IE, you can do that in the advanced options. I've reported my findings on the forum with hope that it will get fixed.

If you've got these features enabled in your browser but aren't having issues with Hotmail, you've probably not turned on the "always use HTTPS" option in Hotmail.

 

Thanks for the note and workaround

 

It appears to be "fixed" now, support for TLS 1.1 and 1.2 appears to have been removed. Hopefully it will come back in the future, fixed.