I've just had a long chat with a NTL tech support guy, who semed very friendly and helpful (and Welsh
). The news problem was identified at around 6pm Sunday night, work started on it at about 7pm Sunday night. It is on priority, but unlike the email servers, they dont have a backup server ready to use in its place (because of the insane amount of data stored in the binaries I suppose). He also said the email/news support people do work 24hours, but they have "reduced staff" at night (which probably means one person).
He said the newsgroups have now been "officially" down for almost 24hours, because of the massive amount of data to be backed up and then put back after repair it could easily take another 24-48 hours. He also said any binary news posted between 6pm Sunday and when comes back online will all become available, as its already queued up.
Im just refreshing one binary newsgroup every few hours too see if its back, I did get some old data appearing before dinnertime, but its gone now.
He also told me the binaries have NOT been taken down perminantly, this is just a rumour - this is nothing but a hardware fault that has to be repaired.
I suppose in 48 hours we will see it hes telling the truth, he had no reason to lie to me though.
NTLs news.virgin.net is also the same as the NTL news binaries (nothing there), if anyone doesnt know we can all use this too.