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A massive "spam bomb" sent from a local computer late Friday night flooded the company's incoming and outgoing e-mail servers, overwhelming the systems and causing error messages and severe delays for thousands of customers trying to send and receive e-mail.
Hargray technicians worked around the clock last weekend to resolve the issue and purge the "spam," which is unsolicited bulk e-mail that usually promotes a commercial product and is sent anonymously from bogus addresses.
As of Monday afternoon, delays in sending or receiving e-mail were reduced to about five minutes, said Tony Stout, data technology manager at Hargray.
"More than likely, someone's (computer) was hijacked or got a virus," Stout said. "Due to the sheer volume of the attack, it took us quite a while to shut it down and clean out" the messages.
Residential customers using a hargray.com e-mail address and business customers who route e-mail through the company's servers were affected by the delays.
A majority of the spam was sent to nonexistent accounts outside the Hargray network, including to popular Internet-based e-mail providers Yahoo!, Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail.
Because many of the destination accounts didn't exist, messages were bounced back to Hargray, further overloading the system, Stout said.
When large e-mail providers like Yahoo! and Gmail discovered the high volume of unsolicited messages coming from Hargray, they flagged the account, triggering error messages and more delays for Hargray customers sending legitimate e-mail, he said.
"It was a self-perpetuating drain clog," Stout said. "It's one of the worst I've ever seen."
Angry customers flooded Hargray's customer service lines over the weekend and through Monday, company officials said. Delays should be resolved by today, they said.
"It's a good thing we stopped it when we did," Stout said. "It could have been much more severe."
