iPrimus will soon need two hands to count recent outages - News

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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iPrimus will soon need two hands to count recent outages

By Byron Kaye, ZDNet News
January 08, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/iPrimus-will-soon-need-two-hands-to-count-recent-outages/0,139023165,120108045,00.htm

In its third outage in as many weeks, Internet service provider iPrimus is yet to resolve its latest authentication failure, leaving some Hobart customers unable to log on.

User authentication at the the ISP's Hobart -point of presence" was dropping out intermittently over the weekend, and technical staff were currently working to resolve the problem, public affairs manager George Hazim told ZDNet.

The 200,000-customer ISP, Australia's fourth largest, has suffered a series of unrelated service failures at a rate of more than one hitch per fortnight. However, Hazim said it was unlikely that the ISP would offer any form of apology to the ISP's customers.

-It's (Hobart server) not out of action, it's intermittent," Hazim said. -Sometimes it's dropping out, sometimes it isn't."

The service failure affected a -couple of hundred" - a -small percentage" - of the ISP's Hobart customers, he said.

Hazim rejected reports from angry ZDNet readers who complained that the weekend drop-out affected iPrimus customers attempting to log on in other states across the country. One reader told ZDNet the ISP's Perth customers were unable to log on yesterday evening.

The weekend authentication glitch is the fifth in eight weeks for the ISP. The latest occurred last week, when the ISP suffered unrelated server difficulties that affected what Hazim then described as -a fair portion" of its 200,000 customers.

One week prior, the ISP suffered a similar, also unrelated, outage.