UK’s Telewest has been suffering erratic email delivery over the last few days during peak hours. Although Telewest hasn’t fessed up, these outages appear to be suspiciously similar to Hotmail’s over the last several days. If that’s the case, chalk up another win for the Sober worm family.

According to Postini, Sober is largely responsible for the recent 15-fold increase in the number of email-borne viruses intercepted. Sophos claims the latest edition, Sober-Z, is attached to nearly 8% of the messages in circulation.

As if that’s not bad enough, separate disasters disrupted service to thousands of email and web clients in the South Pacific yesterday.

An air conditioning failure at Australian web hosting provider Webcentral’s Wickham data center in Brisbane Australia triggered soaring temperatures which fried AU$5 million worth of equipment and forced the operation to shut down, knocking out service to tens of thousands of users, including Regional Express Airlines.

TelstraClear New Zealand subscribers experienced a similar shock when a switch failed in Auckland, wiping out email, web service and DNS resolution for TelstraClear subscribers across the continent.

The Aussies and Kiwis can consider themselves lucky. At least it wasn’t Sober… this time.