Angry customers of beleaguered Internet Service Provider iPrimus have expressed further fury today after the service collapsed for the second time in just over a week.
The outage occurred at around 5pm yesterday and, according to several customers contacted by ZDNet, had yet to be resolved by press time, leaving the company's estimated 200,000 clients unable to send or receive email.
On 27 December last year, iPrimus corporate affairs manager George Hazim conceded that the company had experienced a series of glitches in the preceding weeks as a result of user authentication errors on its servers.
-It happened over a couple of days, for a couple of hours at a time. It wasn't constant. It affected a fair portion of our customers, but not all," Hazim said at the time. -We moved quickly to fix it and it is fixed."
Hazim is adamant the company's current problems do not stem from its earlier troubles, and said the recent outage was fixed within about an hour after the system went down.
-We had one server down yesterday at 5pm, but it was only down for an hour. It had nothing to do with the problems we encountered some weeks ago and the server going down would not have caused any problems, nor would it have been noticeable, to our customers. It was only one server and the other server picked up the slack," Hazim explained.
-I have been told that [those experiencing problems] may have email problems themselves and may not have configured their email systems properly."
Adding to customer confusion, Hazim claims, is a recorded message from iPrimus' technical support hotline that, up until 4.30pm today, told of ongoing problems that had yet to be rectified. He said the message should have been removed late yesterday, and had been left on its voice-activated customer service system by mistake.
