An outage related to an upgrade of Sunflower Broadband’s e-mail storage left many of the company’s customers without access to their e-mail accounts for 12 or more hours Wednesday.

As of 9:30 Wednesday night, 5400 customers are unable to access their Sunflower e-mail accounts.

Early Wednesday morning, a planned software update went awry and prevented all Sunflower customers from connecting to the mail server. Slowly, service returned with users initially being able to send, but not receive e-mail. By mid afternoon, customers on all but one server had their service restored.

About 7900 customer accounts were on that server, Sunflower Broadband General Manager Rod Kutemeier said.

Shortly before 9 p.m., all service was restored, Kutemeier said, however a short time later, another server went down and took down the 5400 customer accounts.

Kutemeier said a technician from Sun Microsystems, the vendor who was responsible for the upgrade, and Sunflower employees were continuing to work to restore service. Kutemeier expected all customers to have service restored by Thursday morning.

“There will be no loss of mail,” Kutemeier said Wednesday morning. “All we’ve lost is the ability to connect to the mail storage.”

Sunflower Broadband is owned by The World Company, which also operates LJWorld.com.