The outage started at 7:30 a.m. ET, with Eliason continuously issuing updates to his Comcastcares Twitter page throughout the day, several times forecasting fixes that failed to materialize.

Aside from Eliason's Twitter messages, or Tweets, there was scant information coming from Comcast about the outage. A message to users clicking on Comcast.net's Live Chat feature on its Help page apologized for the blockage and said, "At this time there is a known issue with our email system, our technicians are working as quickly as possible to resolve the issue."

Apologizing for the hassle, Eliason said Saturday morning: "Multiple servers down after power issue." After a false restart, with servers coming back up and then e-mail again being halted, Eliason kept up a constant flow of Tweets, in response to user questions.

"Just received notice that others that were fixed are being impacted again. I am sorry for this trouble and agree unacceptable," he tweeted about six hours into the outage.

Mail appeared to be flowing again for most subscribers late afternoon, with e-mail being routed to some users more slowly than others. Some users appeared to still be waiting for old e-mail to come through 12 hours after the outage was reported.