UPDATED 3.25pm. An email fault preventing some YahooXtra email users from sending email through Microsoft Outlook is fixed, reports Telecom.

Telecom and Vodafone say the faults plagued their email services for much of the day.

A fault with YahooXtra email prevented some users from sending and receiving email through Microsoft Outlook. Customers could still send and receive email through webmail.

At Vodafone webmail was unavailable for some customers, but they could still use email clients such as Outlook.

Hundreds of thousands of customers use YahooXtra in conjunction with Outlook.

Telecom spokeswoman Jo Jalfon said not all customers had been affected by its fault but did not know the proportion.

Last month YahooXtra experienced two major faults. One delayed the delivery of email to a significant proportion of customers and resulted in a substantial backlog of emails. An earlier spam-related issue meant email to and from thousands of corporate customers was delayed by up to a few days.