To the best of our reckoning this may have lasted up to two hours between 10 p.m. and 12 a.m. on the night of Wednesday July 10.

We're currently investigating the cause, although we're not sure where the problem would lie. Considering that this server has been up continuously since January without problems we're not sure what the problem might have been.

We apologise profusely for any problem this may have caused, and please contact us if you need to discuss anything further. All email should have been spooled through the blueskyhost.COM server during the outage, so there shouldn't be any missing email.

UPDATE:

The outage was the result of one of our customers being mail-bombed with Nigerian Letter Scam emails coming from South Africa. There appeared to be several messages per second and this probably caused the server load to spike and the machine to seize up.

After a reboot and a bit of a clean up everything went back to normal and all the spooled mail came through. We blocked the IP address of the person sending the mail and notified their ISP. We also tried contacting the South African police but this proved to be less successful.

We will be looking at making configuration changes to prevent this from happening again.