Excite@Home, Yahoo! e-mail disrupted Two Internet leaders acknowledge minor technical problems have caused delays for millions of people. But users say the problems aren't so minor. By Reuters June 28, 2000 5:53 PM PT

E-mail service has been delayed for millions of Excite@Home Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. customers this week, thanks to problems with the technology that supports the services. Excite@Home (Nasdaq: ATHM) said the e-mail on its high-speed @Home service has been delayed for about two days, since one of the two "load balancers" that supports the system failed. As of midday Wednesday, the balancer was fixed but the e-mail was still delayed one to two hours because of backlogs.

However, some of Excite@Home's high speed customers said the problems had persisted, at least in certain regions of the country, for longer than the company had acknowledged.

One customer in Santa Monica, Calif., said her entire @Home Internet service, including e-mail, had gone down on Saturday and was still not up as of Wednesday morning when she left for work. She said she there had also been several shorter, "more tolerable" delays over the past year. An Excite@Home spokeswoman said the company has had periodic disruptions with its e-mail in recent months, but was implementing a new system to improve service.

In the case of Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), the e-mail service was not working for about an hour on Tuesday. A spokeswoman said the problem had since been fixed

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), June 29, 2000