On the 16th of March Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found out that Microsoft was blocking the use of HTTPS to the Hotmail users from more than 16 countries, amongst which Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. There was a reaction immediately since most of the countries are either Middle Eastern or African since the assumption was that probably Microsoft changed its policy and it would disable the feature for those countries which it introduced in December 2010.
Finally, Microsoft replied through the media that this was because of a bug which also affected countries such as Bahamas, Cayman Islands, and Fiji.