Strange hotmail message

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I just tried to log in to my Hotmail account and I had to go through the password retrieval process because apparently, my account was locked due to ''trying too many times to log in'', what should I think of this? I knew/know my password (which I changed) very well and I definetely didn't try to log in for weeks, and whenever I logged in it went absolutely fine.

So, what is this?


Edit: How did this happen?

Somebody else has your old PW?

No, the address is about... A month old or so? And I didn't tell anyone my password. And if anyone knew, he wouldn't have been trying to log on and failing, he'd just get in and read my email.

Basically there is a threshold on most password protected systems so that after someone has tried the wrong password 'too many' times in a row it will lock the account so that your password doesn't get guessed.
One possibility is that someone attempted to brutforce (try (usually automated) random passwords in the hope of finding the right one) your account (unlikely because of captcha), or someone may have mistyped their username and tried to login to your account with their password a bunch of times by accident, or maybe it's just a bug. I wouldn't worry about it too much as this kind of thing is not rare, just make sure you have a strong password.

Could it be a virus that's trying to break in? But it would be of no use as everyone knows trying to log in too many times will get it locked, so trying to guess it seems stupid.

Somebody broke into my hotmail account once and sent stupid emails to everyone in my address book. Hotmail ordered me to change my password. I think there is a technique to capture your keypresses when loging in.

It's very unlikely that it would be a virus, they tend to be alot more subtle. Trying to guess isn't so stupid when you think about it, commonly people doing this would have a list of frequently used passwords and a program called a bot which will automatically try to login to a very large number of accounts with passwords from said list, because of the sheer number of accounts it becomes increasingly likely that someone has used a password that is on the list and that their account can be compromised, because of this you should steer clear of using actual words in passwords, again this is unlikely due to systems like captcha, which make it harder for people to automate this, but not impossible.