According to Virgin Media, all subscribers can now send and receive emails again, but some cannot view messages from before the outage.

One user, a retired IT professional, told the BBC that he wasn’t “100% certain these emails will ever be recovered.”

Phil Westlake, who used to develop IT systems for several large UK corporations, has lost access to his previous emails and claims that disaster recovery plans in large organizations would dictate that the situation be fixed in a matter of hours.

“I’m struggling, and I’m sure anyone with any IT background would struggle to understand why that’s so difficult to get back,” he explained.

Virgin Media apologized “unreservedly” for the disruption.

Previously, it stated that all emails were “safe and secure.”

‘Frustrating’
Several email services are provided by the company, including @virginmedia.com, @ntlworld.com, @blueyonder.co.uk, and @virgin.net.

The BBC has inquired as to how many people have been affected.

Virgin Media email users experience extended outages.
Axel Wehrle, Virgin Media’s director of customer support, stated in an email to subscribers on June 23: “Unfortunately, a part of the hardware that manages our mailbox platform experienced a failure, which overloaded the servers and caused service disruption for some email users.”

One unnamed Cambridgeshire consumer told the BBC that the protracted delays were “frustrating” and “upsetting.” Following her husband’s death, her emails were filled with condolences. As executor of his will, she also requires email access.

Another user, Ian, from Merseyside, said the issues had hampered charity auctions he was organizing.

“[My inbox] contains all of the donors’ information, donations, and everything else related to the campaign… and I simply must not have lost any information/contacts/emails, etc., or it will be disastrous.”

“My entire life is on that email account, which I’ve had for about 25 years,” he explained.