Telewest has apologised to thousands of its customers of its blueyonder Internet service after major disk failure trashed 25,000 email accounts. The problem has now been resolved.

The incident happened early on Friday morning wiping out any new email sent during the outage. In some cases it also erased stored email and addresses.

Some 15,000 (eight per cent) of Telewest's blueyonder Internet service - including dial-up and broadband customers - were hit by the glitch. A further 10,000 subscribers with TV-based email were also affected.

In an email to users Telewest said: "We are sorry to inform you of a major disk failure on one of our mail servers. As a result, your mailbox had to be recreated, which, regrettably means that all of your mail stored on the server has been lost.

"We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience and disruption that may have been caused." ®