After a thorough analysis, OzEmail has tracked the e-mail gremlin spotted yesterday down to a server upgrade, saying there was not connection whatsoever with the increase in traffic caused by the Bad Trans virus.
-Our investigations lead us to a server upgrade on Tuesday," explained David Bathur PR manager at OzEmail. -Only a very small percentage of people were effected for about 30 minutes, and there were no outages at all."
Bathur said that the company was initially unable to rule out a link with the traffic increase, as they wanted to ensure a thorough investigation.
-Now that we have found the cause we can categorically rule out any connection with the virus," Bathur said.
Telstra customers on the other hand have been hit by a double whammy. The first service interruption came at 9.30 yesterday morning as some customers were unable to log into their email accounts, and many who managed to get through found themselves spontaneously disconnected.
-We had intermittent problems, until about 11.55 am," said Telstra spokesperson Stewart Gray. -Eventually the relay servers were stopped and restarted, and although that fixed the problem, we are still investigating the causes."
However, -server upgrades", which Gray attributed to an unnamed Telstra vendor partner, have been blamed for a second glitch reported early this afternoon.
-The vendor made some changes to the network last night, and the problem was noticed earlier today," Gray confirmed. -They are presently reviewing the changes, and will rectify the problem shortly."
In Telstra's defence, Gray pointed out the mail networks are extremely complex, and while the problems tend to stand out, he said the overall record was fine.
-A lot of planning goes into changes such as this one," Gray said. -When you take into account the sheer size of the network and the level of complexity involved there are relatively few problems."
As an Ozemail user I can tell you that Ozemail users have been having BIG problems sending emails since early last week (not just on the 5th as per the Ozemail statement) - about the time that Badtrans started to get active. I spent several hours waiting to be connected to their help desk last week & was told that the send problem was related to Badtrans. The problem is still as bad as ever tonight (Thursday 6th).