Posted: 08th Jun, 2009 By: MarkJ
UK ISP
Fasthosts, which is perhaps better known for its website hosting services than its considerably out of date broadband packages, has reportedly left many of its customers without email since Friday last week. The affected users have also complained about an inability to contact Fasthosts customer support department, which has been a historic problem for the provider.
Presently there are no service status announcements and The Register has also tried and failed to contact Fasthosts. It's understood that the hosting giant took its support department offshore from Gloucester to Romania and the Philippines earlier this year. That probably hasn't helped.
UPDATE @ 9th June - 08:15am:We have recieved the following statement from Fasthost's Richard Stevenson:
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.