Spam Attack Takes Out Virgin Mail

A spam attack took out e-mail services for Virgin from Tuesday to Friday last week, leaving thousands unable to access mail.

For several days last week, thousands of UK customers of Virgin.net were having severe problems accessing their e-mail following a spam attack on a firm that processes the company’s mail.

According to Virgin, less that half of the 200,000 customers who use the Virgin.net service were affected, but that’s still a healthy amount. Although no mail was lost, users received error messages when trying to access their inboxes. A Virgin spokesman told the BBC:

"Since late Tuesday evening, some customers on our Virgin Media DSL service may have been unable to access e-mail or webmail."

"This was due to a suspected spam attack suffered by our e-mail supplier which also affected a number of other ISPs. No customers on our cable service were affected.

"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."

Normal service was finally restored on Friday.