Failure hits Critical Path email
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM
May 11, 1999, 6:05 p.m. PT
An equipment failure at email outsourcing company Critical Path has kept potentially tens of thousands of email and Web hosting customers out of their mailboxes since yesterday morning.
San Francisco-based Critical Path, which provides Web-based email services for companies such as America Online, US West, and Sprint, said one of its three core mail storage devices failed yesterday morning.
The company would not comment on how many customers or email addresses were left inaccessible. One of the company's clients, Verio.com's TABNet Web hosting subsidiary, has between 15,000 and 20,000 customers, most of which rely on the Critical Path systems, a Verio spokesman said.
According to Critical Path, the outage was sparked by the failure of a Network Appliance mail storage system. All the mailboxes affected were moved to another machine, but the data on the failed machine had to be "cleaned" before service could be restored, a spokeswoman said.
Network Appliance is doing the equipment repair and data recovery work, and the companies hope to have the mailboxes back online by 10 p.m. today, the spokeswoman said.
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