WebCentral email server crashes, offline for almost a week

SYDNEY - Australia’s largest web and application hosting company, WebCentral, has experienced major difficulties over the past week with the entire email network failing.

Small businesses, corporate and enterprise customers have been trading without email intermittently since Sunday night, with one WebCentral customer from a major automobile manufacturing plant describing the situation as a “major problem”.

The crash was caused by an unusually high load of data weighing down the mail system, which was further exacerbated by a server failure, according to WebCentral corporate communications manager, Monique Roberts.

“We’ve had some performance issues with our mail platform this week, and customers have received delays and intermittent issues. Since Sunday all our resources have been applied to resolving the issue, which is our number one concern at this time,” Roberts told iTnews.

The WebCentral in-house technical service team fixed the problem this morning, and “the mail platform has been stable all day,” said Roberts.

“It is performing well. The web-hosting side of the business hasn’t been affected, either. The mail systems haven’t been down completely since Sunday but they’ve certainly been suffering from load issues.”

The WebCentral customer call centre has been running hot this week, with customer care staff struggling to keep up with enquiries. iTnews waited on hold for ten minutes this morning before being told by an automated response that there were still nine customers ahead in line.

“Our call centre has taken a very large number of calls,” said Roberts.

Some customers will find that mail they had stored in their mailboxes is not currently visible – WebCentral is still working on resolving this problem.

“Our technical team is continuing to work on a few additional pieces of maintenance throughout the night. Currently they’re restoring the mail from a second failure, which happened last night,” said Roberts.

“It’s a process that does take quite a bit of time, but we’re hoping this will be finished by the morning.”