Xtra Glitch Causes Outages, Draws Public Attention

After Telecom launched its Yahoo! Xtra Bubble service, its darker side drew the attention of the public when it suffered outages in the second week of August 2007. The service disruption cut off thousands of customers from the e-mail facility, inundated inboxes with spam and resulted in failed access to the Xtra helpline.

On August 23, 2007, immediately before Telecom upgraded its Xtra e-mail service to Yahoo, there was an increase in spam by 50%, according to Thom Hooker, director of operations at secure e-mail software developer SXM based in Auckland. Computerworld published this on August 24, 2007.

However, according to Xtra Telecom, a majority of its online customers have resumed access to their e-mails, although after a long gap of six days from the scheduled 24-hour shutdown, some are still not able to send or receive e-mails.

Some Xtra e-mail users were furious to receive spam messages advertising Viagra, penis enlargement and other drugs. Some customers complained that while they deleted the e-mails from their spam directory, they unknowingly erased legitimate e-mails as well.

Judy Newell, a user of Xtra e-mail service, said that she received 500 spam mails some of which were as old as of 2005. She almost cleared them from her inbox when she realized that the directory had messages from sources she knew.

It was thought that the problem arose from the service's transfer and registration process of 800,000 accounts. However, the reason seems to lie more in botnets and new viruses. Still, domestic ISPs could be pushing out much of the spam and this could be the primary reason for the rise in spam.

It was difficult to fix the problem, which had emerged from various issues. First, a technical glitch prevented some customers from accessing their Web mail or registering with the new service. The plan for upgrade was for an extended time period and Telecom was clearly concerned about the effects, said Adrian Littlewood, head of consumer propositions. NZherald reported this on August 24, 2007.

While Telecom's first priority is to restore the service, it is also thinking about compensating customers.

Related article: Xtra Glitch Causes Outages, Draws Public Attention

» SPAMfighter News - 9/7/2007