Eliason, who according to the Comcastcares page Saturday had more than 14,000 active Twitter followers, has been widely credited with spearheading use of Twitter for corporate communications.

Comcast officials contacted as e-mail started flowing again were unable to immediately say how many subscribers were affected. Comcast had about 15 million high-speed Internet subscribers at the end of 2008, according to the company's

"The issue impacted some customers' ability to access their emails and address books, but did not affect their ability to access the Internet," according to a issued after e-mail started flowing again early Saturday evening. "It's important to point out that no customer emails were lost in this process," the statement said.

Minor e-mail outages are fairly common, but those that last more than a few hours are typically, depending on the number users affected, considered major occurrences at large service providers.