KEY POINTS:
Sunday afternoon, I'm online and the effects of Telecom's YahooXtra Bubble outage are still being felt a week and a day after becoming apparent.
First I get a press release from the office of communications minister David Cunliffe, who had apparently received a report from Telecom on the outage.
"It
is disappointing when a major provider such as Telecom leaves many thousands of customers without access to their accounts over a 24-hour period," said Cunliffe.
"We live in an increasingly technology-dependent world and outages such as this may occur from time to time. The issue is how these situations are dealt with."
Indeed it is. And it's also unprecedented that (a) Telecom would feel it necessary to report to the Government on a service outage, and (b) that the minister would find it necessary to comment on an internet services outage. This shows just how widely-felt the problem was. And almost, it would seem, to spur Telecom to honour its pledge to offer compensation to affected customers, Cunliffe added:
"I am pleased to hear that the company is looking at ways of compensating those paying for a service they did not receive".
I was hoping to interview Cunliffe regarding the Xtra outage but apparently he is "offshore and off-air over the next few days".
Then came another email, from Xtra customer Alastair Fairley, who is having serious problems with the quality of his broadband connection, but appears to have been ignored by a technical support team struggling to clean up after the Bubble debacle.
"I have wasted over 14 hours of my time on hold or talking with people who don't sound as if they know what they are doing. I have been told to email three days of speed tests to their 'advanced' broadband team. This I have dutifully done (in fact I've now sent them 9 days of results, 3 measurements each at different times of the day) and all I have received is an automated response that the issue is complicated and it may take some time to deal with."
Last night, Alastair emailed me again:
"Have now been on hold for 2 hours (luckily hands free). They have been using the Bubble fiasco as a possible cause, although this problem started several days before their 'upgrade'."
On another note, some responses to my previous blog on technical helpdesk wait times provoked some response from the smaller internet providers. XNet told me its helpdesk waiting time during the survey period was 3 minutes. Slingshot told me theirs was 44 seconds.
Which confirms what we've always known - the smaller companies may not, on the face of it, have the best deals, but often make up for that with better and more immediate service and support.
Check out the Facelift satire programme's take on the Bubble debacle on
YouTube
The local tech blogosphere:
Aardvark's take on the PS3 Play TV
Rod Drury on Apple wireless networking
Richard MacManus on the Attention Economy