Millions of Italians with e-mail blocked: what happens to Libero and Virgilio

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Millions of Italians with e-mail blocked for over a day. Since Sunday evening, the disservice that has hit the approximately 9 million Libero and Virgilio mail accounts of the company Italia Online is now a record.
Mail does not work, cannot be accessed; even for those with a paid account and used for professional reasons. According to the company it is a technical problem in the process of being resolved. In short, the good news is that our data is safe: there has been no loss or even theft of information. The cause is not a “hacker” attack.
“This is an internal technical issue only, which means that we categorically rule out potential hacker attacks and that our users’ data, which is their most valuable asset, is not at risk.” “The service, once restored, will not generate any losses for the millions of Libero and Virgilio mail accounts,” reads a company note.
“Starting from the night of January 23, 2023, disservices have been occurring on the infrastructure to which the Libero and Virgilio web services belong, in particular e-mail, specifies ItaliaOnline, as stated on the Libero website.
“The problem has been identified and is being resolved, which is due to a disservice within our data center. Therefore, once the service is restored, there will be no loss of data for the Libero and Virgilio mail accounts”. “We apologize for the inconvenience that our users are forced to suffer in these hours and we trust in a rapid resolution”, which however does not seem so rapid.
Users are enraged, as can be seen from the utterances on social media. Also for the methods of communication from the company. Beatrice E. on Facebook notes that for hours the mail was blocked without any information to users; and no estimate, later, on recovery times. “Now, for many Liberomail is free, but the truth is that there are also paid users of Liberomail Plus. I am among them, since I also use this account for work”.
“Libero Mail and Virgilio have been blocked for more than 36 hours. The e-mails, indispensable and irreplaceable especially for those who work there, are “frozen” from 9.00 pm on Sunday evening”, writes Salvatore T.
Cristian Vitali, Blogger and Writer, specializing in Football, Comics and Genre Cinema, complained this morning that due to Libero it was unable to be broadcast on Rtl 102.5, because the video access link arrives via email.
To grasp the seriousness of a downtime of this kind: small companies that use Libero are complaining about it and that they can no longer communicate with customers in the usual way.
But also professionals, doctors, therapists. “For the convenience of my patients who communicate with us via Libero Mail: unfortunately we were unable to use this system today”, writes Tiziana C.
Fortunately – one might say – there are social networks as an alternative channel.
And an inconvenience of more than 24 hours is really out of the ordinary. Even Gmail (from Google), the most used mail in the world with 1.5 billion accounts, sometimes goes down; but for a few minutes and a maximum of two hours every two years, as reported by a Wikipedia entry (and various international journalistic sources) on the matter. When the down is long, it usually affects only some regions of the world. Google’s systems are highly redundant, in fact, thanks to economies of scale that only a technological giant can guarantee. If one datacenter is already up and running, there are others ready to make up for it.
It remains to be assessed whether the technical disservice suffered by Libero, of record duration and with an impact also on paid accounts (as we have seen), would have been avoidable with a more extensive data center structure than at present.