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February 23, 2000

EarthLink Says 50-Minute Outage Disrupts Service

NEW YORK (Reuters) - EarthLink Inc.(ELNK.O), the No. 2 U.S. Internet access provider, said a 50-minute outage disrupted service to about 1.8 million customers on Wednesday, but stressed the glitch was not the result of computer hacking, which caused a rash of Web site crashes earlier this month.

Spokesman Kurt Rahn said the company had problems at its Pasadena, Calif., facility verifying the identity of EarthLink customers when they tried to log in to the system. The outage started at about 12:30 p.m. Eastern time and was ``pretty much resolved'' by 1:20 p.m., he said.

The outage followed an effort on Tuesday night to upgrade the system's speed. When customers logged in Wednesday, EarthLink had trouble with the servers that enable the system to authenticate the identity of those trying to use it.

``This was one of the unfortunate side things that happened,'' Rahn said.

Rahn said it was the biggest outage he was aware of at the company. He added that the trouble was not caused by any hackers trying to disrupt the system.

Two weeks ago, online hackers disrupted several of the largest Web operations, such as Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO.O), Buy.com Inc. (BUYX.O), eBay Inc. (EBAY.O), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN.O) and CNN.com (TWX.N). The culprits behind the attacks have not been found.

The outage affected only the 1.8 million customers of EarthLink and not those from those from the former MindSpring Enterprises Inc. The companies completed their merger at the beginning of February and together have 3.1 million users.

EarthLink's shares were up $4.25 at $26 late Wednesday afternoon on the Nasdaq.

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-- Dee (T1Colt556@aol.com), February 24, 2000

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-- Dee (T1Colt556@aol.com), February 24, 2000.