Building over the last week, the problems have left a skeleton IT staff desperately chasing a cure, while sales support staff ring around subscribers who have been over-charged and are unable to connect to the appropriate service. ZDNet Australia, which was directly impacted by the inactive service, contacted sales support staff and received confirmation of the issue.
Unwary subscribers provide credit card details in an attempt to gain access to the News Interactive archive, but are confronted by the following error message:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Invalid column name 'Marketting'.
/secure/CreateInsertpublicCust.asp, line 299
Although subscribers are not able to connect to the service, charges are withdrawn from the credit card account every time reconnection is attempted.
Subscribers effected by the problem have been told that the site has been having problems for a number of weeks, although the last 24 hours have seen the services -go completely haywire", effecting both Australian and international users.
News Interactive have been contacted, but were unable to provide any details of the outage by press time.
