Summary
- Nine million Italian internet users affected by outage.
- Government seeks explanation from provider.
- Provider expects resolution within 24-48 hours.
Italy's government has sought clarification over an internet outage that has been affecting nine million users of internet provider Italiaonline's webmail services since January 23rd. According to a statement from the government, Undersecretary Alessio Butti, who is in charge of technological innovation, has asked Italiaonline for details and to protect users' data while promptly finding a solution to the problem that is impairing popular email services Libero and Virgilio.
Italiaonline, Italy's largest internet company, which is owned by Egypt's Sawiris family, said in a statement that they expected to restore usage of Libero Mail and Virgilio Mail within the next 24 to 48 hours. They also stated that they had no evidence at present that their problems bore any relation to those suffered by millions of Microsoft users on the same day.
The company's Chief Technology Officer, Diego Rizzi, ruled out an external cyber attack as the cause of the issue, and said that the company had been working relentlessly to solve "an unforeseen infrastructural problem." Italiaonline later said that the problem was linked to a bug in the operating system of newly-introduced storage technology provided by a vendor, which it did not identify. They explained that "Given it's an operating system bug it takes time to develop a technical solution, with the primary goal of protecting data integrity."
On the other hand, Microsoft on Wednesday said it had recovered all of its cloud services after a networking outage took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe.
In conclusion, the Italian government has requested information from Italiaonline regarding the internet outage that has been affecting nine million users since January 23rd. Italiaonline has stated that they expect to restore usage within the next 24 to 48 hours and that they have ruled out an external cyber attack as the cause of the issue. The problem is believed to be linked to a bug in the operating system of new storage technology provided by a vendor, which is yet to be identified.