Ozemail restored, customers angry - News

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Ozemail restored, customers angry

By Rachel Lebihan, ZDNet Australia News
February 05, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/Ozemail-restored-customers-angry/0,139023165,120152898,00.htm

Angry OzEmail customers are talking compensation after the ISP's mail servers crashed on Friday, leaving them without email access until Sunday afternoon.

Ozemail is one of the country's largest Internet Service Providers (ISP) with about 400,000 users.

Its mail server outage started to hit 5.30am Friday, preventing thousands of users accessing their email messages.

Despite the ISP's hopes that the issue would "be resolved before evening," the problem wasn't rectified until 2.20pm Sunday and the backlog of mail is only now filtering through.

Not happy
"This is astonishing, of scandalous proportions, inexcusable. For three days now OzEmail customers have not been able to use their email," one subscriber told ZDNet.

"If that happened to Australia Post's 'snail mail' there'd be calls for heads to roll, compensation for lost revenue etc."

"OzEmail appears to have restored my account, but I am yet to receive the 'queued' mail," another subscriber complained.

"Going on averages, I reckon about 200 items are missing," he added. "I wonder how many people will cancel their service with OzEmail?"

OzEmail claims there will be no lost mail implications because all mail was automatically "cached" - placed in a back-up system so that users could access it at a later date.

"New mail will now arrive immediately. However, If people are finding that mail retrieval is slow it's because the backlog of mail is filtering in slowly," a company spokesperson said.

OzEmail would not elaborate on the problem that caused such a massive outage other than to say it "just happened to be a complex problem with that server".

No compensation
Customers won't be offered compensation for the inconvenience the outage caused, according to OzEmail.

"The operations team are very, very carefully monitoring the mail servers," the spokesperson said. "All we can do is double our efforts to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen again. However, every ISP will experience this sort of problem again in the future."