Fasthosts' email fails

Updated Fasthosts' customers have mainly been without email since Friday. But rather than enjoying the peace and quiet, the ungrateful sods apparently want the service back.

The hosting firm has yet to respond to our enquiries but several customers have been in touch.

They complained that they stopped receiving emails on Friday, customer support is unavailable, there is no information on the company's website and Fasthosts is not responding to support emails sent from other email accounts.

Here's hoping punters aren't in for a repeat of the problems in 2007, when hackers got into the firm's servers. In response, Fasthosts reset all its webspace and server passwords and sent out replacements by post.

Earlier this year the hosting company decided to offshore support from its Gloucester headquarters to Romania and the Phillipines.

We've phoned and emailed Fasthosts but have yet to hear back.

A spokesman for Fasthosts said:

On Friday we experienced a technical issue with one of our Email Filers which caused a number of customer email accounts to be taken off-line for around 45 minutes. Upon reactivating the affected accounts, whilst the vast majority were brought online normally, a small number (less than 100 customers) remained off-line due to a corrupt system file upon each. These customers have been assisted by our technical support team on an individual basis. No email has been lost as a result of the outage, it has been retained and will be re-delivered accordingly. Any customers still experiencing email issues should contact our technical support team. We apologise unreservedly to the very small number of Fasthosts email customers affected for any inconvenience as a result of this issue.

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