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Demon Internet services affected by office flood

Kris Sangani ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 20 Aug 1999 17:10 BST

Office floods, mail server crashes and unexplained drains on otherwise stable servers -- it's been a tough week for Demon Internet.

A spokesman for the company explained to ZDNet Friday that for unknown reasons the ISP has experienced a three-fold increase in traffic and email retrieval since August 16 which its servers have not been able to cope with, resulting in several Demon admits it is baffled as to the reasons why.

The result, according to Clayton, "a proportion of customers were unable to access their mail via POP3". However, he added that Demon were making emergency measures and are limiting the amount of users being able to log on to the POP3 server at any given time.

Demon's other services for their ISP customers are not affected. The company stressed that it is fairly unique amongst ISPs in that their customers are able to retrieve their mail via SMTP. Clayton, added "Our customers who receive email in this way would not have noticed any problem at all".

Additionally, Demon's head offices in North London were flooded due to a burst pipe at the weekend, resulting in many administration staff having to relocate. However, Demon were keen to stress that their POP3 servers are located at a different building and were therefore unlikely to be affected.

ZDNet also contacted AOL and BTInternet, who confirmed that they had not experienced any similar increase in user traffic.