Xtra hunts for cause of crash

By JO-MARIE BROWN

Xtra's e-mail system crashed for nearly 24 hours, leaving messages for 150,000 customers stranded in cyberspace.

Half the system went down at 7 pm on Tuesday and was not restored until 5 pm yesterday, after experts from Hong Kong, Britain and the United States were called in to help.

Marketing manager Chris Thompson said Xtra, New Zealand's largest internet provider, had two identical systems that normally carried half the company's e-mail traffic each.

"When one of those systems has a failure, then the other system does a 'fail-over' where it takes control of all the e-mail.

"In this case, we had a really unusual failure ... that led both systems to believe that the other one had failed, so both of them tried to take over."

Mr Thompson said one system went off-line as a result, leaving half of Xtra's 300,000 customers unable to receive their e-mail.

All customers were able to send e-mail, and he promised that the backlog of messages should be delivered by this morning.

But the long delay was one of the biggest network failures in Xtra's four-year history, and a major investigation would be undertaken to try to find the cause, Mr Thompson said.

But one Xtra customer, furious at the delay and cost to his business, is vowing to seek compensation.

David Hardwick runs a technology information business in East Tamaki which relies on e-mail communication with Switzerland and the United States.

He says the breakdown effectively crippled his business yesterday, and he is angry at the time it took to repair the problem.

"When the dust has settled, I'm going to say I was unable to source vital information for a 24-hour period and yes, I do want some compensation of some sort."

Mr Hardwick said he was more concerned about the inconvenience to his customers than lost income, and was angry that Xtra did not have a contingency plan.

"Xtra is supposed to set the example on the standard of service.

"They should have a backup and this morning they admitted to me that they do not have any such facility," Mr Hardwick said.

Xtra's communication specialist, Mary Parker, said the failure had been a "one in a million" occurrence.

"Had we had any inkling that this might have happened, naturally there would have been something in place to prevent it. It's just something that we can't always forecast."

Mr Thompson said compensation was a possibility, but Xtra's priority was restoring the service.

"We would really like to apologise to our customers for that inconvenience.

"We will be doing our best to ensure that it doesn't happen again."