Virgin Media customers in the dark over email outage

Brands sending marketing campaigns to anyone with a Virgin Media email address could simply be “pissing in the wind” after a system outage has left users unable to access their inboxes for over two weeks, with no date for when the issue will be fixed.

Customers first started reporting problems on June 19, although at the time the company claimed it was “working flat out” to resolve the problem. A fortnight later and the firm insists all users can now send and receive emails again but some still cannot access messages from before the disruption.

Virgin Media has been forced to grovel to customers for the umpteenth time; a spokesperson said: “We have now restored the ability to send and receive emails for all affected accounts. Our teams are continuing to work flat out to restore historic emails into the inboxes of a small proportion of accounts. We apologise again for any inconvenience caused.”

One user, retired IT professional Phil Westlake told the BBC he wasn’t “100% sure these emails are ever going to be recovered”. He says he has lost access to his historic emails and said that in his experience disaster recovery plans in large organisations would stipulate that the situation should be resolved in a few hours.

Westlake added: “I’m struggling, and I guess anybody with any IT background, would struggle to understand why that’s so difficult to to get it back.”

The firm operates several email services including @virginmedia.com, @ntlworld.com, @blueyonder.co.uk and @virgin.net.

Bizarrely, the company has reported the email issue to the Information Commissioner’s Office, even though it has insisted the incident was not a data breach and no users’ data or personal information had been accessed or compromised in any way.

Ironically, the last time Virgin Media had dealings with the ICO, it was caught with its trousers down by circumventing privacy regulations to send marketing emails to hundreds of thousands of customers who had already opted out in an effort to get them to change their minds.

The ICO investigation, sparked by the single complaint made by a Decision Marketing reader, found that Virgin Media had sent 451,217 direct marketing emails containing the marketing preference reminder received by subscribers. It was forced to cough up a monetary penalty of £50,000.