UPDATE: BigPond service recovery may take 'several weeks' - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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UPDATE: BigPond service recovery may take 'several weeks'

By Iain Ferguson, 0
October 14, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/UPDATE-BigPond-service-recovery-may-take-several-weeks-/0,139023166,120279675,00.htm

Telstra has conceded it may be several weeks before BigPond e-mail service levels return to normal as the telecommunications carrier wrestles with delays caused by a steep ongoing surge in traffic.

A Telstra spokeswoman told ZDNet Australia that the Internet service provider -- Australia's largest with around 1.5 million customers -- would see "a steady increase in service levels over the next few weeks".

However, she declined to provide BigPond users with an exact date as to when their e-mail services would return to normal. E-mails received by ZDNet Australia early this morning from BigPond users indicated many were still experiencing delays ranging up to several days in sending and receiving e-mail.

The spokeswoman said the surge in traffic over the past few days -- which the carrier believed was due to a combination of spam e-mails and the residual impact of worms and viruses -- had driven e-mail traffic volumes from a regular daily average of around 8.5 million to peaks of around 13 million. BigPond's information technology infrastructure -- which had undergone a significant upgrade between April and August this year to boost mail store capacity as takeup of the service increased -- had a contingency to support daily volumes of up to 10.5 million.

The spike comes at a disastrous time for the telecommunications company's customers, who had previously suffered e-mail delays for around a 10-day period earlier this month as the result of bugs associated with the implementation of upgraded Sun Microsystems software on Hewlett-Packard hardware.

Both OzEmail and Optus customers have also experienced e-mail delays in recent days, with OzEmail claiming it had been on the receiving end of a denial of service attack and Optus attributing the problem to a surge in spam e-mails.

In the case of the BigPond difficulties, it is understood that Telstra is providing rebates to some affected customers as they put their cases to the carrier in a one-on-one basis.