Spam knocks Optus email out

in brief Optus has blamed a spam attack on an email outage that occurred between late Wednesday and Thursday morning.

"We did have some issues on Wednesday evening and our engineers rebooted the email servers," a spokesperson told ZDNet.com.au.

Optus' IT security systems had detected an influx of spam directed towards its mail servers. Its engineers rebooted its email servers at around 10pm Wednesday night, the spokesperson said.

Customers had reported email services were timing out and that they could not log into their accounts, said the spokesperson. Services were restored at 10am yesterday, the spokesperson said.