Telstra BigPond telephone support lines have been choked all day with calls from disgruntled customers following an outage that disabled the telco's mail server.
Despite a recorded message telling customers that "normal services expect to resume shortly" a spokesperson has told ZDNet that there's no estimated time of repairs for the outage that struck BigPond's customer base of over 800,000 at 9.30am.
The network breakdown is due to an authentication database, which stores customer usernames and passwords, becoming too full and making it difficult to access the BigPond network.
"More than 50 percent of people are having difficulty getting on to the network," the spokesman said.
"The system has been rebooted but it didn't correct the problem," he added.
Telstra has yet to find the underlying problem but puts it down to a "rogue process on the network that's taking up capacity".
The telco giant was endeavouring to have the network restored before peak hour Internet traffic commences this evening.
