Google is not having a good day today. After it’s ‘Reliability Engineer’ team took to Reddit for an AMA, Gmail and Google+ went offline in a massive, worldwide outage. As you can imagine at Google, they were likely scrambling to get the service back online but when the servers kicked back on, one Hotmail account started getting spammed with emails.

TechCrunch first noticed the bug and what happens is that when you search Google for Gmail, and then click the Email link shown in the image above, a blank email will open with the address dsp559@hotmail.com already filled in the address bar; Neowin was able to reproduce this bug.

The poor individual whose email account is being pre-populated is David S. Peck who said that he started receiving thousands of blank emails yesterday.

As you can imagine, this bug is clearly having a major impact on Mr. Peck’s ability to use his personal email account. Seeing that the accounts that are sending him the blank emails are all legitimate and not spam accounts, any filter features on Hotmail will likely not stop the messages. As such, his inbox has become filled with useless, but legitimate, email.

The bug is clearly quite interesting as there are millions, if not billions of email address out there but how did it end up that Mr. Peck’s account was pre-populated into the blank message.

While your opinion of Microsoft’s Scroogled campaign may be less than favorable, we can all likely agree that Mr. Peck has been scroogled to the highest degree. Hopefully Google will fix the bug quickly but seeing that the company has had sever issues the past few hours, we suspect that may have bigger jobs on the task list than tending to this bug.

Source: TechCrunch