The problem hit just before 1pm today, after a misconfiguration error meant the Australian email company had to restart its servers.
"Okay, it’s been taking a bit longer than we expected," Fastmail admitted on its status blog, after first predicting the outage would last only an hour.
"The configuration error caused a lot of processes to crash and generate core dumps that filled up some partitions," Fastmail said. "When the partitions filled up, the regular repack processes on the imap servers mailbox listing corrupted some of the files. We can’t reliably start imap servers with these files corrupted."
The firm has started to restore data from backup after discovering some databases were in a corrupted state, and promised that no messages would be lost. "All email is being accepted and queued as normal, and will be delivered once the imap servers are back up," Fastmail said.
Fastmail said its email should be up and running soon, with some forum users reporting webmail access was already working.
While some users expressed frustration at the latest outage, one was a bit more laid back: "What do you expect? It's Friday the 13th."
Fastmail was bought by browser-maker Opera last year. The Norwegian development firm has since unveiled a beta of its own webmail system.
This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk
