'Spam attack' halts Virgin e-mail - 13/10/2008

Tens of thousands of Virgin customers have spent four days cut off from, or with little access to, their e-mail accounts after a suspected spam attack.

• All legitimate e-mails were held back when the "large" attack began on Tuesday evening so the spam could be removed, a Virgin Media spokesman said.
• E-mails were gradually being delivered now the fault was cleared, he added.
• About 200,000 people use the Virgin.net service but well under half of these were affected by the problem, the company stated.
• Error messages were displayed when they tried to log on. Virgin Media stressed that no e-mails had been lost.
• "All customers are able to access e-mail again now, though due to a large queue of undelivered e-mail messages, there may be a short delay before some e-mails reach customers' accounts."