BigPond chief apologises

Telstra has emailed BigPond customers to apologise and detail compensation for its email difficulties.

In an email to customers Justin Milne, managing director at Telstra's BigPond, apologised for the network issue and said the telco was “working really hard to address the situation and doing everything possible to ensure that recent events are never repeated”.

Milne described the email “spike” at the heart of BigPond's issue, which he attributes as being caused by the Swen virus, as “unheralded and without precedent”. 

He said Telstra was making many changes to the email platform over the following weeks. “We are building substantial extra capacity into our email systems and will continue to expand this capacity so we can be sure that we can cope with this kind of event if it ever occurs again,” he said. Telstra customers will be automatically credited with two weeks of BigPond access as compensation.

Milne said affected customers would also be offered three months free access to anti-spam/anti-virus filters and personal firewall software, with charging introduced after 17 January 2004. “Of course if you don't want to continue with the security software after this time we will not charge you,” Milne said.