[Russ]

Taken from Pipex's server status page regarding yesterday's problems...

During the morning and early afternoon of Sunday 27 June 2004 many PIPEX customers were either unable to connect to the network, or if connected, unable to access some PIPEX servers, including email and Web.

Network connection and server connections would not have been possible, though many customers who were already connected to the network were unaffected.

A full engineering team was deployed to site and service was restored just after 2pm.

This issue was caused by the failure of a key network router, but in such a way that backup capacity was not brought online as a result of the failure. This issue has not occurred before during the 2 1/2 years that the router has been in service and so the affected hardware was changed out as a precaution, and a full investigation will be carried out by the supplier to try to determine what went wrong.

Please note that due to the nature of the outage some connections may have been "default accepted" within the BT network and so may require your PC/router to be disconnected and reconnected (or in some cases, powered off and on again) before normal access is restored.

We sincerely apologise for this interruption to service and any inconvenience it may have caused.