Local Internet Service Provider OzEmail suffered an authentication outage today preventing subscriber access from as far afield as the US.
The mid-morning outage meant users' passwords were not accepted when they tried to log on.
OzEmail claimed the network suffered the outage between 10.25 and 10.49am this morning, however US users were apparently told servers would be down for "up to an hour".
"It definitely wasn't a capacity issue," an OzEmail spokesperson told ZDNet.
"It's purely conjecture at the moment, it may have been some kind of human error," he added. "Someone may have switched a file during some kind of upgrade."
OzEmail wasn't at first aware that US customers had been affected by the outage but said overseas users trying to access the MyMail page may have been prevented from doing so if the authentication problem had extended to OzEmail's global roaming service, iPass.
"If iPass is down they wouldn't have been able to connect at all," the spokesperson said.
By midday the cause of the outage had still not been identified.
Ozemail is not correct in its statement of the lengh of the downtime. I logged in about 7.30am Friday and got the non-acceptance of password message. I rang up customer service and was told the problem would be fixed in a short time.