Over two weeks have passed since Virgin Media email users were unable to access their inboxes, with no resolution in sight.

It wasn’t until Monday, 19 June, that customers started reporting problems.

Some users are still unable to access emails from before the disruption, Virgin Media said.

“I’m not 100% sure these emails can be recovered,” said one retired IT professional to the BBC.

In his experience, disaster recovery plans in large organizations would stipulate that the situation should be resolved within a few hours, according to Phil Westlake, who used to design IT systems for several large UK companies.

I struggle to understand why it’s so difficult to retrieve it, and I think anyone with an IT background would struggle to do so as well.

In response to the inconvenience, Virgin Media apologized “unreservedly.”

Previously, it claimed that all emails were “safe and secure”.

‘Frustrating’

A number of email services are offered by Virgin Media, including @virginmedia.com, @ntlworld.com, @blueyonder.co.uk and @virgin.net.

It has been asked by the BBC how many people have been affected by this.

• There is a lengthy failure rate for Virgin Media email users

“Axel Wehrle, Virgin Media’s director of customer service, wrote in an email to customers on 23 June: “Unfortunately, a part of the hardware responsible for managing our mailbox platform failed, overloading the servers and causing email service disruptions.”

According to one Cambridgeshire customer, who didn’t want to be named, the extended problems were “frustrating” and “upsetting”. Messages of condolence followed her husband’s death in her emails. As executor of his estate, she also needs access to his email.

Organizing charity auctions had been disrupted, according to Ian, another user from Merseyside.

There is all the information about donors, donations, and everything else involved with the campaign in [my inbox]… and I must not have lost any information/contacts/emails etc. otherwise this will be disastrous.

Since I’ve had the email account for about 25 years, my entire life has been in it.

According to Virgin Media, all email users are able to send and receive emails as normal following a recent issue with our email service.

Currently, a small percentage of impacted users cannot view historic emails in their inboxes.

“We understand that this will be frustrating for those with important emails and documents stored in their inboxes, and we apologize unreservedly for any inconvenience.”

Our teams are working flat out to restore all historical emails as quickly as possible, but the problem is taking longer than we anticipated.

The company has reported the email issue to the Information Commissioner’s Office, but stressed that the incident was not a data breach and no users’ data or personal information had been accessed or compromised in any way.