Tuesday, August 10, 2010

The Great Telus email fiasco! Email once again down after unbelievable 16+ hour interruption!


Telus is grossly incompetent - and they have been proving it for over a day by losing our email service!

After losing the ability to send and receive email at 7:30 p.m. last night due to an apparent lightning strike in Edmonton at Telus server headquarters, I am tonight - guess what? Unable to access my email yet again.


My email was totally inaccessible from 7:30 p.m. Monday night till about 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon for me and no doubt tens of thousands of other Telus customers.


It then lurched to life on Telus Webmail only, then eventually started appearing to work on Outlook.


I say "appearing" because it turns out that not all email showed up on Outlook - some emails I've seen on Webmail still haven't shown up in my Outlook inbox.


But now everything is down - Telus Webmail and Outlook!


The message I just got when trying to access Webmail reads: "Login failed for some reason. Most likely your username or password was entered incorrectly."


Like hell!


The "some reason" or the "most likely" explanation is that Telus are dumbasses who can't fix their email system despite the multi-millions all of us Telus customers pay them - including the outrageous amount of money that CEO Darren Entwhistle makes.


In 2005 Entwhistle made - sit down first - $14 million in salary, bonuses and stock options!


Last year Entwhistle was paid just under $7 million in total.


For that kind of money just to the top dog I expect one hell of a lot better email service.


I also expect a significant refund on my Telus invoice for this month - but it will likely not be there - just like my missing goddamned emails!


- Photo credit - The Lazy Canadian

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17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Plus, if you are Telus Mobility customer, you are now expected to fork over an additional $2 a month for a paper invoice. Never mind the contract never mentioned this "fee", Telus will screw you over ten ways to Sunday. As soon as Shaw brings in it`s cell service, everything - internet, TV, home phone and cell will be with them.

Anonymous said...

Great Caesar Salad, Bill.

Give it a rest. You're using something electrical which is sensitive to be affected by electrical storms. Figured you would have had a parallel email system in place such as hotmail or gmail for use in such circumstance.
or at least Shaw.

Ernwhistle isn't to blame here. Those people who run the servers are also TWU members. But systems aren't immune. Remember the earthquake we had in 2001? Cell phone calls completely overloaded the cell phone system in Vancouver.

Next thing you know some headcase is going to blame Gordon Campbell for this.

Anonymous said...

I USED to use Telus, but after a similar fiasco years ago, I switched to Bell and have had only one issue in about 5 years.

They even continue to honour the plan I originally had, which was amazing,after it was long gone. Free all summer too... can't go wrong with that!

Sorry to hear about this. Make sure you email them a copy and link to your blog, I bet you will get a large credit then... lol.

Salvaich said...

What was important is that TELUS made no attempt, as far as I can tell, to get any message out to the general public by other means. I learned of the outage from an Edmonton radio station then realised this was a serious problem by the litany of events on a Vancouver Sun blog. My mail was out for about 20 hrs.

There is a slight parallel to the HST debacle. No matter what the message is, if you fail to alert you voters or customers in a timely fashion, there is a credibility risk at play. The Liberals and TELUS seemed to have failed at both
events.

TELUS turned an outage to an outrage.

-99-

Sarah said...

For $7 million I could set up the appropriate backup servers and backup of email at another location.

I just find it amazing with the money Telus has that they don't have sufficient backup or disaster recovery planning.

What the h@#$$ are they doing with the outrageous fees they're charging?

Anonymous said...

Switching from Shaw to Telus I save over $60 a month for equivalent services.

Anonymous said...

At the time of reading this, I'm aware of Rogers / Fido customers unable to send text messages. Bill I think you're over reacting... Technical issues happen.

Anonymous said...

There are a lot of strange goings on. Comments disabled, can't find page, Face Book, being wiped out, only certain people though. TV stations, with technical difficulties. Offices, get ransacked. All sorts of vendetta's, happen in BC. I quit buying newspapers out of Vancouver, because of bias. I boycott, some TV media. Citizens from BC, live under a lot of repression. Democracy and Freedom is gone.

Anonymous said...

Ah Telus. Don't get me started. Since my internet was put in, I have reported it EIGHT times because it doesn't work properly. It still isn't working properly.

Telus contracted out most of its work in BC and Alberta to the Philippines and India, and the remainder that is left here is again, in large percentages, contracted out to non union companies.

Didn't ya hear? They had a labour dispute 5 years ago and most of the unionized employees are gone.

PeterInEdmonton said...

When I checked my email Tuesday morning, I encountered the same type of message and my service was not restored until that afternoon.

Ironically, I was not checking my email Monday night, because as a resident of Edmonton, I was out foolishly risking getting zotzed by that same lightning storm trying to clear my down spouts to make sure no water got into my basement; I can confirm that we had quite a storm here.

That in no way excuses TELUS for such poor service. Sounds like their “fail over” plan didn’t fail over, and lightning protection is a pretty basic thing for a data centre. You may wish to look at the compensation for Kevin Salvadori, who is, I believe, the Executive more directly responsible for this service, than Entwistle. He would be the one responsible for knowing what a reasonable data centre budget is and for making sure that it was properly spent.

By the time I called their support line, they had posted a recording stating that there was a problem with their email service. I have observed in the past that TELUS has poor lines of communication between their technical support and their off shore customer service reps. They don’t know when the problem is at their end, rather than the customers. It would be interesting to know how quickly they got that recording posted. I didn’t have to wade through too many layers of voice menu frustration before I got the recording, which is better than their past horrible voice menus.

Bill, the message “password was entered incorrectly” is one that Outlook put out, not TELUS. You would have gotten a similar message if, say, gmail or hotmail was down at the server end.

Kim said...

I used to be a faithful customer to BC Tel, my sister and her husband both work for them. When they became Telus, labour relations went south, big time. As did service. I had Telus highspeed, all contracted in for three years and the service was throttled, plagued with telusdetectedspam. I switched to shaw.

Have you tried a web based email account? You don't lose mail when your computer crashes.

Stan Mortensen said...

Generally, we have had few problems with Telus services but this one kind hurt, I am still not sure if I lost any outbound or inbound emails, clients just always assume you received them. It does seem odd that since the web was operational they could have posted a message on their website which would have saved a lot of frustration Monday night and Tuesday morning.
I did receive an automated call today advising me of a $10.00 credit being applied to my next billing. of course, I have no idea how much money I lost in lost business.

Anonymous said...

Not that I'm meaning to sound defensive of Telus, but PUH-LEEZE, stop your whining about a minor inconvenience. Yes, you're right you should get a refund, but probably won't. Yes, it's outrageous for Entwistle to make that much money whether the product is perfect, flawed or simply pathetic but guess what? He does, not in small part because fools such as yourself publicly endorse this nonsense. Have you checked out every other company that you buy products from and how much their CEO earns? Ridiculous isn't it? Criminal in my opinion. But you like the system just as it is. You keep on writing your rants and signing as many petitions as you want, whatever keeps your wheels spinning in place. But don't sit there and bitch about the unfairness of it all until you decide to be less supportive of big business.

By the way, how is it that HST thing going? Not so good, huh? Any idea why? No, I didn't expect you would figure it out. Maybe if you took some political science course where you could learn the difference between democracy and dictatorship. That might help unless you'll be busy wasting time in the fall on the more impossible side of Recall and Initiative.

Anonymous said...

Bill - use gmail - that way you are not dependent on your host ISP. You can recover email from any computer.

David from Vancouver said...

While this post was a bit over the top, Bill has a point.

Telus' failure to tell us what the problem was, was a real pain in the ass and pathetic customer service. Simply posting a note to us paying customers on their website or having a recorded message on their automated service would've made the service interruption forgivable.

But having us running around in circles trying to fix it only to learn, after hours of wasting time, that my email wasn't working because of something they did was a pain in the ass.

Anonymous said...

Telus would do much better by sticking to wholesale DSL and not bothering to retail.

Anonymous said...

Well it is now now March 2013!!
I phoned telus a couple of months ago because of issues getting my email. They said they were working on it.... Now it is WORSE?! I find it silly that I would have to go to g-mail when my internet supplier cannot give me decent email service? It basically almost useless at this point. I have to log in over and over and over and over and over and over and over and if I am lucky I get logged on. I am VERY unhappy and will likely be leaving telus soon. I am not happy with telus mobility either. They don't return calls, their sales people say they will give you this and that, then another says no....