mail service went down for the count Tuesday - and if you get yours at Excite, it was your fault, kind of.
Excite officials tell Wired Digital technical trouble triggered by an overload of user traffic left millions of Excite mail users unable to get to their messages for a good part of Tuesday.
Excite@Home runs the e-mail service. They say the trouble started at about 7 a.m. EDT, when "a flood of traffic from workers and students checking e-mail after the Labour Day holiday" jammed the system, says Wired Digital.
Moreover, the company had just started a radio campaign for its Net-based VoiceMail service, putting an even heavier drain on the system.
Company officials say the e-mail system looked to be back to normal by 7 p.m. EST Tuesday night.
This was the latest of several recent free e-mail service lapses, though nothing even close to the security breach which left over 40 million Hotmail users without password protection.
And, as it happens, according to Wired Digital, some of the heavier traffic volume that caused Excite's e-mail to dive might have come from Hotmail users hopping to a competing service.
