UK ISP TalkTalk Customers See Slow Recovery After 3-4 Day Email Fail

Customers of TalkTalk’s Internet service in the United Kingdom are slowly beginning to see their email (@talktalk.net) return to normal after an unspecified problem with the ISPs related services prevented them from gaining access, often by throwing up authentication (login/password) errors.

The problems appear to have started on Thursday last week and lasted until Saturday 30th before the provider finally issued a service status update to confirm that their “webmail and IMAP service had been restored and we can now confirm that full service has been restored to POP3.”

The ISP then promptly apologised to customers for “the loss of service over the past couple of days and thank you for your patience whilst our engineers worked to restore service“, although it soon emerged that many customers were continuing to experience issues (long topic here) and some were still reporting troubles this morning.

In fairness it’s not uncommon for it to take a few hours or days for email servers to catch-up and then settle down after a few days of downtime. Messages will have been sitting on the servers awaiting delivery and these then rush to reach their destination, which can bog the system down until any backlog is cleared.

TalkTalk’s issue follows hot on the heels of a massive outage that impacted BT and Sky Broadband’s Yahoo! based email users, which also took several days to resolve. As usual we always recommend that anybody who relies upon email should consider getting a separate address using a dedicated email or webhost, which for a small fee can often also give you your own domain. Big ISPs have a shaky history of email support.