Slashdot Mirror
Massive Email Crash Hits Canadian ISP Shaw
rueger writes "One of Canada's biggest cable/Internet providers has their customers in an outrage. '... after an interruption of Shaw's email services Thursday led to millions of emails being deleted ... About 70 per cent of Shaw's email customers were affected when the company was troubleshooting an unrelated email delay problem and an attempted solution caused incoming emails to be deleted ... Emails were deleted for a 10-hour period between 7:45 a.m. and 6:15 p.m. Thursday, although customers did not learn about the problem until Friday, and only then by calling customer service or accessing an online forum for Shaw Internet subscribers.' To top it off, when Shaw did send out notices about this, they looked so much like every day phishing spam that many people deleted them unread."
Are one of the reasons I don't use ISP hosted email. Main reason is portability.
Except when the failing account is that forwarder account.
Like, ones that make a backup before messing with critical data? As an elementary precaution known to anybody halfway competent in IT?
This just demonstrates a massive, massive management screwup, as they allowed unqualified personnel to work on their systems. Save a buck, loose a million.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Making mistakes is human. This is why a competent professional acknowledges that he will make a mistake sooner or later, and designs his activities so that mistakes in execution won't have catastrophic consequences. These guys failed to properly do this.