Telstra suffers BigPond email outage

Telstra is slowly recovering from a nationwide issue with its BigPond email servers that has left it dealing with a backlog of undelivered emails.

Customers of the email service started reporting connection issues at midday AEST on the Whirlpool broadband forums, though an official service status update pegged the outage starting at 10.42am.

A Telstra representative said the issue had been identified about an hour later, and that the BigPond email servers had been reset.

The cause of the server issue has not yet been made public. Further comment was being sought from Telstra.

Although emails had initially been expected to flow again after the servers were reset, the Telstra representative later clarified that "there will be slow to no response for a little while, due to a backlog of emails that weren't able to get through while the outage occurred".

The carrier claimed the issue had been resolved by 6pm, though users were still reporting residual issues on the Whirlpool forums as late as 8pm.

Telstra said any customers unable to log in to the BigPond webmail portal could access the service through its messaging.bigpond.com portal.

Update 5/9, 12.10pm: A Telstra spokeswoman said the cause was "still being investigated".