TPG’s email services suffered a “critical” nation-wide outage for more than two days, leading to widespread customer outrage and threats of class action lawsuits.

Users of the Australian internet service provider started reporting issues with its email service early last week.

The company officially reported that the outage began at 4.30pm on Wednesday afternoon and continued until nearly 9.30pm on Friday night. TPG has blamed the long outage on a storage system failure.

“TPG acknowledges and apologises for the recent outage in its email system,” TPG said in a notice to customers last week.

“The outage was caused by a failure affecting the storage system, through which the email systems operate. The failure has meant that customers have had difficulties using the email systems during the period of outage.”

TPG engineers had identified the issue and were working to fix it by Friday morning, with all TPG and Chariot email addresses impacted.

“The TPG engineering team has been working around the clock to solve the issues and it is believe that all customers should, in stages over the next 24 hours, be able to send and receive emails,” the company said on Friday.

“Work is also being done to bring older emails online and updates will be provided as that work progresses. The resolution of this issue is the number one focus within our business right now with many dedicated teams working to resolve this at the earliest possible time.”

TPG email users were left frustrated by the outage and were unable to send or receive emails during this time.

Many took to the TPG forums to vent their anger, but were first forced to open a new email address to access TPG’s own site.

“This is getting beyond a joke,” one user posted. “I am a long-time TPG customer and have only had minor issues up until now. This is just absolute crap from a major player in the Australian provider market.”

“This is a staggering amount of time to be affected by such an issue,” another user said.

The outage had a big impact on many Australian businesses, with some considering a class action lawsuit over it.

Many also reported that they still had not received any emails that were sent during the outage.

“This is a very big disaster for many, many users,” one said. “Expect to lose a lot of business over this.”

It’s not the first time TPG has raised the ire of consumers, with the competition watchdog earlier this year slamming the telco’s $20 non-refundable “prepayment” it had been hitting customers with for a six-year period.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reported that TPG would have raked in “millions’ from the fees, with court proceedings instituted over it.

A much-anticipated merger between TPG and Vodafone was also knocked back by the ACCC in May. ACCC chair Rod Sims pointed to Australia’s “already concentrated mobile services market” as to why the merger shouldn’t go ahead.

“TPG is the best prospect Australia has for a new mobile network operator to enter the market, and this is likely the last chance we have for stronger competition in the supply of mobile services,” Sims said.