Glitch cuts Net giant's e-mail services
Thursday, August 16, 2001
MARY ANN BENITEZ
A technical glitch cut off e-mail access for customers of one of Hong Kong's biggest Internet service providers yesterday, with some saying they had been unable to access e-mail since Tuesday.
Pacific Century CyberWorks-HKT described the problem as minor, saying the fault with its Netvigator service was discovered at 8am and repaired by 11am. A spokeswoman would not say how many customers were affected.
But Netvigator customers said the problem was more serious and that the slowdown began two days ago.
One customer said she had problems with e-mail on Tuesday when she could not retrieve messages for several hours.
"Today I had the same problem and messaged PCCW, who said it was a server problem," she said.
"I have since only been able to collect e-mails on and off. I have just tried again and got a 'Server is busy. Please try again later' message.
"As a customer one accepts delays on Hotmail, which is a free service, but to have these delays on a broadband connection, which is expensive, is not acceptable."
A PCCW spokeswoman said the hardware fault on one of Netvigator's several e-mail servers was not connected to the feared Code Red II computer worm.
A hotline message advised customers until late yesterday that "due to server busy [sic], it may cause some of our customers a delay in sending or receiving e-mails at this moment".
One customer said she was told by technical support staff that the server went down late on Tuesday.
"It was down until about midday today. I had been trying to log on since 8am, and when I finally got on to the tech people at HKT, they said it went down late last night," she said.
Another said: "Late last night I couldn't check mail, and again some of this morning. But Netvigator's standards of service are pretty poor and this kind of thing happens frequently, so I just take it for granted."
Another said he had problems with the broadband all day.
PCCW charges $198, $238 or $298 a month for broadband access, depending on the type of service provided. It reportedly has 280,000 subscribers.
Meanwhile, the Government's intranet server, which contains data for all departments and bureaus, remained paralysed for a third day yesterday after an attack by the Code Red II virus.
The server, which is used internally by civil servants using special passwords, was shut on Monday to stop the worm spreading.
The public does not have access to the server.
maryann@scmp.com
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