Virgin Media says engineers are working to restore full email service to its ADSL subscribers after a hardware failure at partner Tucows downed the system.

The outage occurred on Tuesday evening and is still not fully resolved. A Virgin Media spokesman said on Thursday afternoon that webmail access has been fixed for all the 100,000 customers affected and about one third have client access.

Other ISPs have been affected by Tucows' problems too. The firm said: "We are working around the clock to resolve this issue and are in close communication with the ISPs to help in minimizing the impact of this service interruption. We deeply regret the inconvenience this has caused."

There's no word on when the fix will be complete.

Virgin Media said no email has been lost and that outstanding traffic will be delivered as soon as service is fully restored. The spokesman was unable to comment on whether Tucows had breached its a service level agreement by failing to offer effective backup systems. ®

Bootnote

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