Virgin Media e-mail clients enter third day of inbox infuriation

Reg readers who use Virgin Media e-mail say they’re nonetheless struggling to achieve entry to their messages after a multi-day outage.

The problems have been ongoing since Sunday night, though no less than one reader has reported receiving a few of their mail since then.

Others nonetheless unable to entry their inboxes and going through connection timeouts informed us this morning that they’d acquired a “present estimated repair time” of 1300 UK time right this moment, whereas one other complained: “They’ve up to date their repair ETA about six occasions a day since Sunday.”

Over on Twitter, Tim Baxter quipped: “Are you as assured in regards to the 1pm goal as you might have been in regards to the final 5 targets that you have missed?”

We have requested Virgin Media for an replace on the repair. It informed The Reg yesterday: “We apologize once more to these people who’ve been experiencing points with their e-mail companies since Monday. Our groups are persevering with to work on restoring all customers’ entry as a precedence and we’ll do that as quickly as doable.”

VM informed some clients yesterday: “You are actually in a position to ship and obtain emails as you usually would. Nonetheless, you should have observed that any emails acquired on or earlier than 19 June won’t be showing in your inbox, despatched gadgets or some other folders.”

For these clients seeking to cool off and calm down, there are some ideas over on Virgin Media’s social media orifice on how finest to have fun World Yoga Day.

Others say they would like a bit extra communication and data on the technical drawback behind the outage.

A reader informed us earlier that that they believed Virgin Media had “by accident” taken down their buyer mail system on Sunday “and have been restoring it from a backup ever since.”

They speculated {that a} failed replace of Microsoft’s Change Server on Sunday was concerned and that VM has been restoring mail from a backup ever since. We requested Virgin Media to verify whether or not they had run into a problem updating Microsoft’s groupware.

A Reg reader claimed: “In addition they turned off their service standing checker for everybody on Sunday evening, so no one can test the service standing for his or her space.”

The service standing checker was again up on the time of publication.

Over on the group boards, consumer KH89 complained simply minutes earlier than publication: “All my folders are lacking and the emails previous to Monday, I have to entry tickets for the weekend. It is a nightmare, I’ll find yourself shedding a vacation as I’ve to pay the stability however can not entry the e-mail to seek out the reserving. One thing must be completed ASAP and common updates.”

A consumer calling themselves DaveNutts chimed in: “I respect the group are working onerous however a bit extra data as to what the issue is, how it’s being fastened and why every repair deadline shouldn’t be being met! I hope you respect from the various points right here that persons are genuinely nervous that their outdated folders and mails usually are not accessible.”

We requested VM if it might be doable to ship over even the briefest of technical explanations of this incident. As overlaying many, many of those points prior to now has taught us, typically individuals sympathize with a pressured admin who makes a mistake, though you’d additionally count on bigger corporations to have backup plans and redundancies.

Talking of redundancies, it’d make sense for some to make use of an e-mail service that isn’t related to their broadband ISP.

Virgin Media suffered a serious, multi-hour broadband outage in April and nonetheless has not offered an evidence past “it is up now” – though it did apologize to clients about the issue. ®