KEY POINTS:
An internet glitch yesterday left university students' confidential grades and lecture notes open to access by strangers.
Slingshot customers trying to use their own accounts were directed into random email, Trade Me, Facebook and Bebo pages.
Slingshot user Regan Cunliffe, of TV community website Throng, said he could see the subject of an email in another person's account from a gay website saying someone was interested in him.
User Michelle Smith also saw another person's emails through Facebook.
Otago University has a website called Blackboard, which enables students to read lecture notes and announcements, receive grades and send email.
Communications student Jacob Andrew, who runs the Media Fetish blog, said his flatmate had an assignment due today and was supposed to be working on it last night through Blackboard.
"We have assignments due and we're trying to log in to Blackboard where all our online resources are to get assignments done, and we can't even access our own accounts.
"I'm logged into someone called Sophie's account with all her papers."
A university helpdesk worker said several students had phoned about the problem, and technical workers had turned off an internal system which showed students' details.
Mr Andrew was also having problems with his Facebook page and turned off his modem to stop anyone seeing his details.
Last night a recorded message for the helpdesk of Victoria University's myVictoria student portal said: "There is a failure causing disruption to several people."
Student emails for Auckland and Waikato universities are provided through Google's Gmail, which also had problems for Slingshot users.
On the Cre8d Design blog, Rachel wrote: "This afternoon I tried logging into Gmail as I usually do to check my email and discovered that I was logged into someone else's account.
"I got a real shock and tried a few more times, the same thing happened again ... Am seriously concerned about what is going on."
But Slingshot, which has "tens of thousands" of customers, was playing down the incident last night.
The general manager of Callplus' internet arm, Mark Callander, said the company had received only a handful of calls from Trade Me users saying they were being logged into other people's accounts randomly.
He said the problem was resolved within 15 minutes.
A similar problem in May enabled some of Bebo's 40 million users to view other people's private information.
Mr Andrew's account became public and someone who was signed in under his name downloaded pornography to his page.
Another user, Roxanne, found her profile showing National party leader John Key as a "friend".
