Virgilio and Libero down, emails that don't work, what happened?

On the night of January 23, nine million Italian users thought they had had a bad dream. Instead what happened was reality, with mailboxes

Virgilio and Libero down, the emails that didn't arrive and the inability to access the email boxes.

Virgil and libero down

Certainly not the first down in the history of these two operators, but certainly the longest and most problematic. Today, a week after that first technical error, everything seems resolved, but, given the importance of the providers, the number of their users and the number of emails potentially involved, it is good to find out what happened, how it developed the thing and the possible actions and lessons for the future.

Emails don't work

When the first access attempts went wrong, users turned to social media and specialized sites (such as DownDetector) to understand whether the problem was theirs or the entire structure's.

They then discovered that the block had national significance, with both email providers, Virgilio and Libero blocked.

Two different mailboxes that date back to the same provider, Italiaonline, which immediately tried to manage the situation by correctly informing customers about it, the procedures in place and the recovery times.

Let's find out them, for those who don't know them yet or are curious to know who they entrust their emails to every day.

Libero and Liberomail

Active since 13 July 1999, Libero mail was born as Libero Mail Free. Behind this provider there was already Italiaonline, the historic owner of this brand.

Probably the longest-standing among the Italian emails, Libero Mail is a mailbox that has evolved gradually, managing new tools and features as they were created and made available to users. Increased dimensions, new features and the possibility of accessing via an email client and then also a dedicated app are just some of the features that have appeared over the years.

Today Libero mail exchanges more than 200 billion emails per year.

Libero mail's structure is totally rooted in Italy not only in ownership but also as a data center. This mailbox is in fact based on the Supernap data center located on the outskirts of Milan.

Libero mail, like many other email boxes, is offered in two versions, one paid and one free with advertising.

Virgilio Mail address

Even more "ancient" than Libero , Virgilio is probably the first ferryman of Italians towards the endless world of the Internet. Born well before Google and Libero , Virgilio saw the light in 1996. Without rehashing the whole story we can consider Virgilio as a pioneer of the Italian Internet. The result of a small "start-up", Virgilio first entered the Seat Gialle Group and then became part of Telecom's internet offer, supported or often even replaced by Telecom Italia.

In 2012 Virgilio was then sold together with other Telecom web activities to Italiaonline.

Today Virgilio is a complete portal, where email is just one of many options. This service known as Virgilio mail has two options as well as Libero , a free version and a paid version.

Virgilio and Libero down, what happened

As we have noticed and as reported in the lines above, today Libero Mail and Virgilio are two different services only on the user side, but being from the same owner they rely on the same software and hardware structure. This is the main reason why the two email platforms crashed at the same time and for the same reasons.

Now that the problem seems to have disappeared, we can finally understand what happened.

The good news is that the problem is not due to external attacks. It was not a virus or malware, but an internal procedural problem.

The cause appears to be a "move".

Not the classic move of furniture and furnishings but that of the database of the two mailboxes. As many as 4 Petabytes of information to be moved to external storage.

During the transfer, a “critical” threshold value (not indicated) was reached which would have blocked access to the memory.

The provider therefore found itself "in the middle of the road", with the impossibility of accessing the new system, blocked by this error, but also of accessing the old one, as many of the mailboxes were no longer present there.

The block lasted about 5 days and manifested itself in various forms, from lack of access to mail to sending and receiving problems, from spam problems to delays in deliveries.

What happened to our mail?

The question that many asked was therefore: "but what happened to my email?", in particular referring to all those emails that were supposed to arrive between 4pm on January 23rd and the system reset.

According to Italiaonline these emails were not lost, but should reach users in the next few days.

The conditional is mandatory, as these emails are not physically present on Italiaonline's servers but should have remained in the custody of the email provider who, when attempting the first sending, received the "email inaccessible" message.

Did it really go like this for every email and every provider? No one will be able to know for sure, one can only hope that all email providers have adopted the "best practices" envisaged in these cases.

Today the access problem seems to have completely disappeared for both Webmail and the Android app. Sporadic malfunctions are still reported for the iOS app but the hope is that they will also be resolved soon.

Will it happen again? What does this block mean?

The explanation of the problem given by Italiaonline suggests that the problem itself is unrepeatable in the future. However, the same thing will certainly remain as a shadow over this mail service, especially given the unusually long times.

Probably many users in these almost five days of interruption will have started to use alternative systems and solutions and only time will tell what the impact will have been on the number of active users of Libero Mail and Virgilio Mail.