Virgin mail struggles to its feet

Three-day outage remains unexplained

Posted in Telecoms, 27th August 2009 09:30 GMT

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Updated Virgin customers have been struggling to stay in touch this week, as their email service started failing on Monday and only managed to get its act back together this morning.

Quite what went wrong is still unclear, but engineers started working on the email outage on Monday night with an optimistic four-hour fix predicted. Eight hours later the problem remained, and within 24 hours Digital TV customers were also reporting email problems which persisted until 8.30 Thursday morning.

Almost a year ago Virgin's email service was severely disrupted by a storm of spam, which led to a similar outage as the company spent a couple of days clearing the servers. Hopefully systems put in place make this unlikely to be a repeat of that incident, though the symptoms are similar.

Virgin says it is still investigating the issue, and will let us know when they've identified the problem. In the meantime everything should be working smoothly, but do tell us if you know different. ®

Update: Virgin has been in touch to let us know the failure wasn't Spam this time around, but a disk failure that hit about 50,000 Blue Yonder users and was fixed Wednesday without the loss of a single e-mail.

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