The cause of this week's email outage that hit 180,000 TelstraClear customers was an error made during a planned maintenance planned upgrade, the company said in a statement this afternoon.The error, which occurred late Monday, meant the company's data st
The cause of this week's email outage that hit 180,000 TelstraClear customers was an error made during a planned maintenance planned upgrade, the company said in a statement this afternoon.
The error, which occurred late Monday, meant the company's data storage system were disconnected from its email servers.
"While the storage system was quickly re-attached the additional time it took to restore full services to customers was because of the need to ensure our email servers were restored without losing any emails. As a result of this prudent approach no data was lost when the servers were restored," the company said in a statement.
"The error was not due to a system failure, or an external attack. TelstraClear is confident this was an isolated issue and have put in additional controls to ensure this issue does not happen again."
The telco might want to up the security around its servers anyway, as there are a lot of angry customers who would happily mount an external attack - albeit with sticks rather than malware.
Although service was restored by late Tuesday for most TelstraClear customers as an email backlog was cleared, others told NBR that their inboxes were still bare on Wednesday and Thursday.
Today, NBR received a half-dozen further complaints.
One read: "It is now Friday midday and I am still having problems with my emails. Some don't arrive at all, and of-course I don't know exactly how many haven't arrived - you don't know what you don't know! I do know that some emails I have sent haven't arrived yet. I sent one yesterday at 4.30pm and it still hasn't arrived today at 12.30pm !!!"
Another picked up on the common theme that it has been hard to know what's going on during the outage, and difficult to contact TelstraClear:
"I have a very hot ear waiting on the phone to Telstra, and I took over from my wife after 40 minutes! No response despite contacting via website and it would appear,trying fruitlessly over their phone system.
"A message to say they cannot help would be easier on the ear than listening to a poor mans Richard Clayderman playing elevator music.
"Question is,Why release inaccurate information to their customers through the media? Or are they simply protecting their share price? More so,How will I be compensated for the lack of correspondance? A costly debarcle and no resolution for me in sight.
"Disappointing from a normally good supplier of services."
