iiNet hit by five-day mail outage

Customers of iiNet’s sub-brand Netspace have had trouble accessing email for at least five days, and the ISP can’t say when normal service will be resumed.

iiNet’s brief incident report says almost nothing about the situation, other than the cryptic sentence “Customers may experience login failures or slow loading times when accessing Netspace mailboxes.” Social media posts seen by iTnews suggest that both webmail and email clients are affected and have been since last Friday, December 12th.

A Whirlpool thread on the outage contains posts complaining of possible data loss. It also hints at previous instability with the service.

iiNet’s not saying much about the incident. Its incident report says “Work to restore Netspace mail is ongoing. No ETR [Estimated Time of Return] is available at this stage.” Similar messaging has reached social media.

Thank you for reaching out to us here. We can confirm that work is still being done to restore Netspace mail, no ETR has become available as yet: https://t.co/Pc9CKFsnJl. Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused. -Maajidah

— iiNet (@iiNet) December 16, 2019

The incident appears to impact Netspace alone – iiNet’s other acquired brands seem not to be impacted. Given that iiNet acquired Netspace in 2010, the retention of isolated email systems may be as remarkable as the outage itself.

iiNet has been contacted for comment.