From Sunday 22 January Libero mail is Virgilio Mail address, the Libero and Virgilio e-mail services do not work. The blackout, which has been going on for 5 days now, prevents millions of people from accessing their mailboxes and, therefore, from receiving and sending emails.
The company has issued a statement in which, in addition to apologizing for the inconvenience, it provides an explanation of what happened and estimates recovery times in 24/48 hours. But when users will actually log in to Libero mail?
The causes of the Liberomail blackout
To date, anyone who tries to access the mailbox of Libero mail, he would be faced with a message from the Libero staff explaining the causes of the disruption:
“In recent weeks, in order to offer an increasingly better and more up-to-date service, we have introduced an innovative storage technology to support our mailboxes, supplied by an external vendor, a storage technology manufacturer used by some of the most large companies in the world. Unfortunately, an operating system bug has compromised its correct functioning and, consequently, that of the mailboxes present on it. The vendor is working tirelessly to resolve the issue, creating a fix to resolve the issue, with support from all of our internal teams.”
Practically, Libero mail has changed the storage technology used, i.e. the user data storage system. The transition to a more modern information storage technology led to a system failure, which caused the disruption.
Users are worried, not only because they can't use the service with obvious mistakes, especially for those who use the Libero mailbox for work. Since this is a problem that has affected data storage, there is a risk of information loss. In this regard, the staff of Libero mail ensures:
“However, since this is an operating system-level bug, the solution is requiring technical development times, with the primary objective of protecting data integrity. Times have been long so far, we realize that. We have been the email provider of Italians for 25 years, our users are not scattered around the world, but they are our neighbors, our friends and relatives, the professionals of our country. Therefore, we cannot fail to have the protection of Italians' data as a priority, because they are our strength. This is why we want to reopen the boxes in a definitive and stable way.”
When will the service be active again?
The company plans to restore service Libero mail and Virgilio Mail within 24/48 hours and adds:
We are aware that this creates difficulties for our users, but being the Italian mail provider requires us to be extremely serious.
Meanwhile, the Italian government has also intervened on the matter, which involves 9 million people in Italy and is the most serious blockage of an email service since the Internet has arrived in our country:
“A situation that is creating inconvenience and damage to all the professionals who use these tools. To this end, through the offices of the digital transformation department, I contacted the managing director of Italiaonline - the company that manages the two providers - in order to clarify the origins of the problem and identify as soon as possible a solution that can guarantee of user data integrity.”1
Alessio Butti, undersecretary in charge of technological innovation, speaks, echoed by Simona Loizzo, Lega deputy and member of the culture commission in the Chamber:
“It is necessary to file a class action. Since these are historical accounts, there are many users, even with professional profiles. All people who have received significant damage to their businesses. For this reason I hope that a class action will be proposed to protect the damages received and that action will be taken promptly. I also invite Agcom to open a file in order to understand the real responsibilities." 2
In the meantime, the service remains inactive and further communications are awaited from Libero mail. To stay updated on the progress of the fix operations, the Libero team adds:
“As always, we will communicate any updates through our touchpoints.”
We await news on Libero mail and Virgil Mail. Keep following us for more news and to stay updated on the latest news.
UPDATE:
As of today, Monday 30 January 2023, the alarm seems to have disappeared and (almost) all problems have been resolved. Access to the Libero and Virgilio email service is available again (with the exception of iOS users) but many users are wondering: what happened to the emails received on down days? Concrete answers are expected from the manager.
