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."
Comments and questions
Not wanting to defend TCL or anything (and lets face it, they have shown themselves to be major league muppets over the years), but when you send an email, it will have a retry time associated with it.
Usually messages that cannot be delivered by a mail server will retry at ever increaing time periods until it reaches a limit and decides that it is not deliverable. 2,5,15,30,60,240 minutes (with a 1 or 2 day "undeliverable") are common retry periods, so a missing email mail be into the 4 hour retry period from the sending server and won't show up for while yet.
still not back to normal! i am seriously thinking of moving to another company as there is not enough info of when services will be restored back to normal, business e mail isnt coming through so that means we are loosing money!!!!!
My email was only out for one day - and then was fully restored within two days. I'd just like to say this is the only time EVER I have had this sort of email trouble - and I have been a Paradise customer for 12 years.
I have been a TelstraClear Customer since they started with Kiwi Cable and Clear ( I was customer number 2X) This is the very first experience of and outage I have had with them and while inconvenient I thought they did really well. The only method of comms they had to their customers was via the media cos your email was down duh! I thought this was a great way to keep us posted,,,,Big thumbs up. Wish I could say the same for my XT. At least I am a TelstraClear mobile customer now as well. Thanks TelstraClear...all those other whingers (like Grumpy Kiwi) that threaten to change should do so and see how much better it is on the other side....good luck to you
I am not singling out TCL here, every major ISP in NZ is staffed by minimum wage idiots. You have to deal with a lot of monkeys before you can talk to a great ape. TCL stick in my mind because of the time I called to arrange a MX record change for a client and the guy on the end of the phone tried to tell me how to change the email settings in Outlook.
This, and the Datacom outage yesterday are a great example of our "cloud computing" future. Your data will be held by a 3rd party and when things go wrong, you'll be told less than nothing about when it will be fixed and why it went wrong.
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