Freeserve users have been unable to access their email for the last 24 hours after the ISP suffered a hardware failure that knocked over its mail servers.

The problem occurred yesterday at around 6.00 am (BST) but was fixed earlier today.

The scale of the outage is not fully known but the problem is understood to lie with Energis, the telco that underpins the service of the UK's biggest French ISP.

According to sources no data has been lost and the backlog of emails is beginning to clear.

A spokeswoman for Le Freeswerve admitted that there had been a problem but that it had now been rectified.

The hardware issue is also believed to have hit other ISPs.

No one from Energis was available for comment before publication. ®