Spam downs Virgin Media email

A spam attack on Virgin Media's email supplier last week took out access to tens of thousands of customers.

Email provider OpenSRS, which is part of Tucows, was apparently hit by a spam attack, which took down services it provides to Virgin Media over the Virgin.net platform. Some 200,000 people have email accounts with that service, but the majority were not affected, Virgin Media said. Other ISPS were also affected.

The loss of email access happened because legitimate emails were held back while the spam messages were cleared out, a Virgin spokesperson told the BBC.

"Since late Tuesday evening, some customers on our Virgin Media DSL service may have been unable to access email or webmail. This was due to a suspected spam attack suffered by our email supplier, which also affected a number of other ISPs. No customers on our cable service were affected," Virgin Media said in a statement.

In a letter to its email resale clients, Tucows acknowledged the blame fell entirely on it, and admitted the fault may have cost it business, as it laid out how it will avoid the problem in the future. "What will we do about it and why will this never happen again? I know for some of you that doesn't matter, you are done with us, but I want to express this for the rest of you," the letter from Tucow's Elliot Noss read.

"What this will mean for us is clearly the need to take the other elements of the service to a completely new level. Here I mean monitoring, change management, emergency protocols and procedures and operating efficiencies."