Hotkey franchisees await update as email outage rolls on

The ISP has become one of the higher-profile casualties of the recent Primus data centre failure in Melbourne.

The blackout forced Hotkey to shift its web and mail servers and is continuing to hurt portions of its franchisee community and customer base.

Several franchisees and resellers told iTnews they had been able to minimise the impact on their businesses by improvising "workarounds".

Chris Lappos, managing director of Neotech Information Technology, said it was 'business as usual', and that customers had experienced "nothing major with regards to downtime".

"All our customers have stayed on because they trust our judgement," Lappos said.

"The majority use Outlook and download emails directly to their machine, so they haven't lost much apart from emails they haven't read."

Another business, Queensland-based UltraFast Communication Solutions, said they had "an occasional Hotkey customer being escalated from helpdesk but most customers have been very patient".

"We've had a few customers that have been impacted that have moved their hosting away but we've managed to retain most of them by offering an alternative email solution hosted on our own mail server," managing director Stuart Auld said.

"If any customers are still having difficulty having their domain email delivered, I urge them to get in touch with the Hotkey help desk straight away as we can offer a solution to those customers hosted on the UltraFast servers."

In an update to its website, Hotkey acknowledged that "there are a small number of customers that are not getting email and we are looking into this."

"This is still a high priority and we will keep updating the website for progress. All mail not delivered is still in the archive," Hotkey said.

Hotkey also said that the "majority of mail from 1 to 3 February has been delivered, however we are actively going through the mail logs to ensure none is missed and this is being delivered."

"The process of restoring the email archived prior to 1 February has commenced, however this will take a number of days as we need to ensure that the file structure in each mail box is maintained," it said.