MSN access problem and POP3

Its rare that I use my hotmail or live email accounts.  Kept it for testing purposes only.  And while trying to do some tests today, I had problems with getting on to its webpage.  The following error comes up:

Its a good thing I don't use this as my main email account.  We have gotten used to relying everything being online.  I'm using IMAP for all my email access since it is the most convenient specially with our network.  This makes me think that I should be enabling my POP3 mailbox again.  On the other hand, if the server is down, I probably won't even be able to download through POP3.  

I did a test and setup a POP3 account on Thunderbird and it was able to download the mails.  It seems the problem is more of web-based rather than the mail server.

Its good that Windows Live provided a POP3 access.  But what if this happens to Yahoo?  Unless you're a paid customer, you don't have any POP3 access as an alternative.