Virgin hit by email slowdown

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 18 Feb 2008 at 17:14

Virgin Media has called in Microsoft to complete an urgent upgrade to its email service, after being hit by a mysterious bug.

The bug is resulting in massive slowdown on one of Virgin Media's eight email clusters, with one forum poster noting that his email took 11 hours to arrive. The problems have been occurring since the beginning of the month, affecting around 10% of former Telewest customers.

Virgin Media says that it's been trying to track down the problem with the help of Microsoft engineers, but has had little success beyond regularly rebooting the cluster.

The incident has prompted the company to speed up its migration to Exchange 2003, which it believes will resolve the current problems.

"It's not been a good week and of course we apologise for any inconvenience this has caused," says Alex Brown, senior product manager for Virgin Media on the company's support site.

"Service should be improved now [not saying all's sorted!] and the key focus for us is to push on with the Exchange 2003 migration.

We have some additional resources being allocated to try to speed things up as much as we can."

"We have been suffering intermittent problems affecting email access for some customers with @blueyonder.co.uk email addresses," says the company in a statement.

"We have been working with our platform supplier Microsoft to establish the cause of this problem and have made good progress, however some issues remain. We are working to resolve these as a top priority. Virgin Media apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused."