Pac Bell E-Mail Service Crashes
November 10, 2000
More than 200,000 customers of Pacific Bell Internet were without e-mail service for much of Thursday as a hardware problem kept users from using their accounts.
Company spokeswoman Heather Alexander said the problem began at about 5 a.m. Thursday and affected some 230,000 customers — about half of the company's California customer base. Service was restored at about 6 p.m. that evening. Alexander said late Thursday afternoon that the problem still had not been fixed.
The outage was the latest in a string of e-mail problems Pacific Bell customers have endured during the past few months. In March, heavy use delayed delivery of e-mail for hours; in June, the company's e-mail service was down for about 20 hours; and in September, about 180,000 customers were without e-mail for about five hours.
Alexander said no e-mail is being lost, but customers can neither send e-mail nor receive messages that have been sent to them and stored in Pacific Bell's computers.
Active.com gets funding Active.com, which produces software for registering sports leagues and other recreational activities, has received $21 million in funding from the venture capital arm of Deutsche Bank Alex Brown.
The La Jolla-based company recently acquired Sierra Digital Inc. of Sacramento, and said it intends to keep Sierra Digital's operations in the Sacramento area.
Sierra Digital develops software for managing and scheduling activities for parks and recreation departments.
Work force trimmed Saying that its work force was greater than revenues warranted, Folsom technology start-up CampusEngine.com has laid off eight workers, about 10 percent of its employee base. The layoffs reduce the work force from 74 to 68.
Company spokesman Bill Halldin said CampusEngine.com, which helps create an online presence for campus newspapers, is in no danger of failing, but that its pace of hiring outpaced its revenue stream. "We believed we needed to reduce our work force to bring costs in line with projected revenue," he said.
Halldin said CampusEngine.com is still growing quickly and now has 94 newspapers under contract, up from 26 in June. He also said the company expects to announce a new round of financing sometime next week.