Untold thousands of customers of New Zealand’s largest ISP, Telecom-owned Xtra, are gnashing their teeth at an extended
outage to email services today and last night lasting 22 hours so far.
A planned upgrade of the Xtra Pop3 server began at 6pm last night, the last time that a very large, but unknown, number
of Xtra’s 313,000 customers had access to their email accounts.
At 1 pm, Xtra’s automated network status announcement was acknowledging only that the service was not working for some
customers.
After five minutes waiting on hold, a call to the Xtra help desk elicited a guesstimate of resumption of services at 4pm
this afternoon. As this is published at 4.30pm there is still no way to read imcoming Xtra email.
During the outage mail inboxes have also been unobtainable through the XtraMail service, an alternative route to check
email, leaving Xtra customers with no way of knowing who is emailing them.
No refunds or compensation for lost business etc incurred during this extended and unplanned outage, which occurred on a
work day as part of a planned upgrade, can be expected because of out clauses in the Xtra service provision contract.
Xtra customers who need to use email everyday are advised to consider setting up free temporary email accounts on
Telecom rival Clear’s www.Zfree.co.nz service, www.Yahoo.com, or www.hotmail.com for use during outages such as this.