topic Re: Email completely down in Email

Email completely down

SLHick210 — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:27:38 GMT

Emails completely down for the last 2 hours. Asks for password etc but still doesn't connect (Mac Mail client). As we are working from home this is a big issue, especially after the "too many recipients" fiasco the last few days.

Re: Email completely down

TonyBrown — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:34:55 GMT

Agreed. Webmail also down, reports 'Connection to storage server failed'.

I really wish PlusNet would be more proactive in acknowledging these problems, I guess they are just trying to make their public facing reporting look better than it should be.

Re: Email completely down

brookhaven — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:35:16 GMT

Same here - I get the impression it’s a serious outage...

Re: Email completely down

Anneyc — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:39:26 GMT

Same here- Have just spoken to Plusnet and there is an issue with 'High IP traffic' (no idea) which has taken emails etc down. Engineers are working on it and hope to have it up and running within 2-4hrs. We should recieve all our emails then.

Re: Email completely down

stuck — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:47:45 GMT

@Townman can you shed any more light on this latest email disaster?

The error I'm getting is:

error (0x800CCC0F) : 'The connection to the server was interrupted

Re: Email completely down

GoSquirrel — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:55:29 GMT

Same here, webmail down, Outlook client can't connect...

Re: Email completely down

CWatters — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:03:24 GMT

Cant access email via Outlook on Windows or an email client on Android.

Error 0x800CCC92: "Your email server rejected your login"

Re: Email completely down

Anneyc — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:37:29 GMT

Just had some emails come through- hopefully sorted now

EDIT: don't seem to be able to send still though!

Re: Email completely down

Townman — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:37:12 GMT

Email is NOT DOWN.

There are (were) some network issues which are (were) impacting access to email for SOME users.

Access to the user portal was also impacted.

From personal experience these appear to be working again albeit a tad slowly. All of my mailboxes are synching, but the user portal is a bit lumpy!

Re: Email completely down

stuck — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:45:38 GMT

OK so it might not be down right now but if you've ploughed through today's posts on this board nearly al of them are about not being able to send / rec email so there most definitely was a problem with email.

The main plusnet home page seems to be back again now but it too was MIA for a while.

EDIT a few mins later: nope the plusnet homepage has just disappeared again.

Re: Email completely down

Townman — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:57:22 GMT

No, definitely not a problem with the mail service at all.

IT systems are complex beasts and it is very important when discussing issues that there is discernment of the difference between a service being down and the access to that service failing.

The the experience might be similar, but one is specific to the service being labelled as down, whilst the other is likely to also inhibit access to a number of facilities. Get the focus wrong and folks head in the wrong direction.

Re: Email completely down

stuck — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:29 GMT

@Townman wrote:

...Get the focus wrong and folks head in the wrong direction.

Agreed and so it's absolutely critical that when problems arise Plusnet should inform users asap of what's gong on.

Yet Plusnet say nothing and thus folks head in the wrong direction and the end result is confusion, frustration and anger.

Re: Email completely down

mantonis — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:21:49 GMT

Forgive me, but if I am unable to log on to the PlusNet email and if. at the same time my browser works without any problems there is definitely a problem with the email service.

Re: Email completely down

Townman — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:25:38 GMT

@mantonis

Not definitely, there is a possibility, not a certainty.

In this case it was not email, some users did not encounter issues. The issue was as has been advised a network issue. Do you understand the difference?

Re: Email completely down

stuck — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:35:10 GMT

@mantonis wrote:

Forgive me, but if I am unable to log on to the PlusNet email and if. at the same time my browser works without any problems there is definitely a problem with the email service.

Yes and no. What @Townman is pointing out is that while the end user experience may be that "email is down" that's not actually true. The mail servers were fine it's just that no one could reach them. For the end user that sounds like splitting hairs but IT geeks need to be exact, otherwise they'll go off trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist instead of fixing the thing that is broken.

Have you never heard the old joke about the passenger being taken by helicopter from Seattle airport to the city centre on a foggy day? The pilot gets lost so hovers by a big building and calls across to the people in the offices, "Where am I?" The answer comes back, "In a helicopter". Immediately the helicopter pilot resumes the flight and lands safely at the correct destination. The passenger is stunned and asks how the reply the plot got had helped him. "Simple, the answer was technically correct but completely useless so that meant I was speaking to the IT guys on the MS Helpdesk, and that meant I knew exactly where I was."

Re: Email completely down

Townman — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:57:52 GMT

... so in fact not entirely useless, the pilot was indeed able to work out where they were.

The disparaging "geek" is not an overly helpful term here or anywhere; being precise is essential. The right questions need to be asked, may be the pilot should have said "I am lost, where are you ?".

It is a bit like coming to a country road with a closed sign, which gives no indication of the exact point of the closure, with diversion signs to the other side of the closure pointing in some other direction. It is not enough to 'simply' know that you cannot get to the place at the end of the road, you need to know how far along the road you can get, so that you know if you should follow the diversion to get to somewhere in between ... or just ignore the road close sign.

Re: Email completely down

stuck — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:15:05 GMT

@Townman wrote:

...or just ignore the road close sign.

Which is what many, many people did in our village, despite the signs giving full details of exactly where the road was closed. It was 'interesting' watching HGVs turning round when they came up against the closure.

Re: Email completely down

TonyBrown — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:30:23 GMT

So in summary, there was 'an issue', which resulted in loss of many services, including email for some. As we pay PlusNet for providing these services, I would have expected some update on the service status, if only along the lines of 'we are aware of a problems affecting....', and 'we've now identified and resolved the issue'.

There is a forum here helpfully labelled:

Service Information

Updates on our services and any issues.

Is there somewhere else we should be looking for basic information about whether there are active problems, or are PlusNet choosing to not report them. I won't accept 'they were too busy fixing the problem', it takes less than a minute to make a post.

Re: Email completely down

davev1 — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:14:57 GMT

High IP traffic AKA DDOS attack on Plusnet servers?

Re: Email completely down

Townman — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:20:05 GMT

Cause has not been indicated.

On the basis that some services and some email users were not impacted, it would be reasonable to suspect an internal network issue.