WebCentral customers still without email

A spokesperson for Melbourne IT claims that WebCentral has fixed the problem for around 70 per cent of its customer base, but the first five customers that iTnews spoke to said they are still without email.

The outage, which began at 9:30am on Tuesday, has seen WebCentral customers stranded without managed Exchange email, POP email or webmail for 26 hours.

WebCentral says it had a full incident team working throughout the night which handed over to a second team at 7:00 am this morning.

The outage has angered WebCentral customers, scores of which have made complaints in iTnews' forums.

Adding to their frustration, WebCentral's 1800 support number is jammed up, and both its top level corporate support number and the number Melbourne IT provides its closest reseller partners are ringing out without response.

A spokesperson for Melbourne IT told iTnews that the "underlying issue has been resolved" but that "a few of the mail stores on the platform started the day well but have deteriorated." 

The spokesperson claims that half of the backlog of email messages queued in the past 24 hours have since been delivered. "The rest will come through as the day progresses."

Customers have confirmed with iTnews that some of their queued emails "trickled through" at 3:00am today, but since 9:00am they have again been without service.

"It's definitely still dead," said WebCentral customer Nick Wilson from digital branding company Signmanager, after being contacted by iTnews.

Wilson has no doubt the company is losing work as a result of the outage. "Email is our primary form of communication," he said. "My colleagues are not getting their go-ahead requests to do work for clients. It's very frustrating."

Four more customers have confirmed their service had not been restored.

One Sydney-based customer, who wished to remain anonymous, said there have been a series of outages since 2008, for which Melbourne IT has offered little in the way of compensation. "In my experience, their attitude is to say nothing unless pushed," he said.

The spokesperson for Melbourne IT told iTnews that there are no SLAs (service level agreements) offered on managed exchange, POP e-mail or webmail services.

"We apologise for the inconvenience that this issue has caused to our customers' businesses," the Melbourne IT spokesperson said.