Libero Mail and Virgilio: e-mail restored, the latest news

Libero Email and Virgilio have started the recovery of email accounts. This was communicated by the company that manages the two providers, Italiaonline. After 4 days, customer emails gradually become available again. Not all immediately, because technical times are needed. “It is with relief that we can communicate to our users that a progressive return to normality is underway,” he writes in an Italiaonline note.

“The process of remittance online for Libero Mail and Virgilio Mail has in fact been launched, which involves only a first part of the customer base. In the next few hours, all the mailboxes will gradually become fully active again”, adds the company which then admits: “It took a long time, as we said, but the primary objective was to protect the integrity of our users’ data ”.

Then a reassurance to its customers: “The moments of #down in a tech company can happen, our goal now is to be an even better mail provider than before for all Italians. We will continue to communicate through our touchpoints until the issue is resolved.”

How many Libero and Virgilio accounts are there in Italy

The problem with Libero and Virgilio’s emails has involved millions of people in Italy, where there are 9 million active email accounts created with Italiaonline services. The latest report that talks about the distribution of emails in Italy is from Statista. In 2018, it calculated that, out of 44 million email accounts used in Italy, the leading email service in Italy was Gmail with 19.2 million users (45%).

The second is Libero Mail and Virgilio with 11.1 million accounts (26%). Followed by Outlook with 6.2 million (14%), Tim with 4 million (9%) and Yahoo with 2 million accounts (4%). The rest divided between minor services (at the time) such as Protonmail and email.com. Today Italiaonline’s estimates are slightly lower, while there are no updates on other e-mail services.

What had happened to Libero Mail and Virgilio

Italiaonline yesterday issued a note in which it tried to clarify the causes of the disruption: “Over the past few weeks”, reads the press release, “in order to offer an increasingly better and more up-to-date service, we have introduced an innovative storage technology to support our mailboxes, provided by an external vendor, a manufacturer of storage technologies used by some of the largest companies in the world. Unfortunately, an operating system bug has compromised its correct functioning and, consequently, that of the mailboxes of mail present on it”.

The company therefore says that the vendor, the supplier, is “working tirelessly to solve the problem, creating a fix (adjustment, ed) for the solution of the problem, with the support of all our internal teams. However, since it is a bug at the operating system level, the solution is requiring technical development times, with the primary objective of protecting data integrity”.