Hotmail Down For Hours While Obama, Biden Personally Read Everybody's Email

In an unannounced outage this morning, Hotmail has temporarily shut down its email service to give the White House time to "catch up" in its monitoring of private emails.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have been personally handling the "monitoring" as they pour through the millions of emails that the service sends every day.

"They started a couple of days ago," said a White House Spokesman, "But people kept sending emails.  We thought a massive shut down would give them time to catch up."

When asked whether this would affect his company adversely, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer just laughed.  "Are you kidding?  We shut down the Hotmail brand months ago and changed everything over to Outlook, and consumers didn't even notice.  Do you really think any of them are going to connect this to Mircosoft?"

Answering a question about how long it would take to restore service, the spokesman shrugged.  "It's been what, five hours already?  And Biden can't read without moving his lips.  You do the math."

Biden, who seemed to have overheard him, bristled at the comment.  "Look, this isn't as easy as phone calls.  I can just pop in my headphones on the way to work."