Italy seeks clarification, prompt solution to massive email outage

MILAN (Reuters) - Italy's government has sought clarification over an outage that has been affecting nine million users of Internet provider Italiaonline's webmail services since Jan. 23, it said on Wednesday.

Answering a query from Reuters, Italiaonline said it had no evidence at present that its problems bore any relation to those suffered on Wednesday by millions of Microsoft users.

Undersecretary Alessio Butti, who is in charge of technological innovation, said in a statement he had asked Italiaonline for details and to protect users' data while promptly finding a solution to the problem impairing popular email services Libero and Virgilio.

"We expected to restore usage of Libero Mail and Virgilio Mail within the next 24/48 hours," Italiaonline said in a statement.

Chief Technology Officer Diego Rizzi on Tuesday ruled out an external cyber attack and said the company had been working relentlessly to solve "an unforeseen infrastructural problem".

Italiaonline, Italy's largest internet company and owned by Egypt's Sawiris family, earlier on Wednesday said 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.

"Given it's an operating system bug it takes time to develop a technical solution, with the primary goal of protecting data integrity," Italiaonline said.

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.

(Reporting by Elvira Pollina; editing by Valentina Za, Kirsten Donovan)