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Excite says hardware trouble caused portal outage

The company confirms that the site was down earlier this afternoon, but says the service has since been restored.

Excite.com's Web site was inaccessible briefly today because of a hardware problem, the company confirmed.

As previously reported by CNET News.com, visitors to the popular Excite@Home portal page were unable to access the site at all, instead receiving "page cannot be displayed" or "no response" errors from their Web browsers. The site was down between 11 a.m. PT and 11:50 a.m. PT.

Excite spokeswoman Kelly Distefano said the outage occurred because of a "simultaneous switch and router problem." She said the company has since replaced the problem hardware.

"Service has been restored and is back to normal," Distefano said.

Last month the company's @Home Internet service was hit by an email outage that delayed messages for two days. Last year, the free Excite Mail service experienced several outages, and some customers were locked out of their accounts for up to 48 hours.

Outages have been relatively common on popular Internet sites. Earlier this year, hackers hit Yahoo, Amazon.com, Buy.com and other leading Web companies with denial of service attacks, making their sites largely inaccessible to the public. And last year, eBay suffered through numerous outages as it vastly increased its listings and its base of buyers and sellers.