Lycos knocked offline by ISP outage

Lycos was knocked offline yesterday and the search engine is blaming the company's ISP for the outage.

Lycos' customers were without access to email and other services after construction workers accidentally damaged the systems of Savvis, a publicly traded ISP, on Monday night, according to a spokeswoman for Lycos. The web portal was back online early on Tuesday afternoon.

A Savvis representative confirmed the company had suffered an outage but declined to give specifics as to the cause or how many other companies were affected.

The spokeswoman said: "This was a 100 per cent connectivity problem with Savvis. We contracted with them for 99 per cent of our hosting and network services, and they guaranteed their service. This was a major failure on their part."

Asked about Lycos' back-up systems, the spokeswoman said the company has them but that they, too, were handled by Savvis.

Savvis made headlines last week when it announced it would sell its content delivery network services business to Level 3 Communications for $135m.

Lycos, which has 25 million monthly visitors, was among the top search engines and web portals prior to the dot-com meltdown. But the company has since seen Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! become the industry powerhouses.

Greg Sandoval writes for CNET News.com