Webcentral email outage hits thousands of customers

Customers of web hosting business Webcentral (owned by listed group Melbourne IT) are furious after an outage left them unable to receive emails for more than 24 hours.

The first complaints about the outage surfaced on technology site Whirlpool at around 9:30am on 28 April.

While Webcentral told customers this morning “the underlying issue that has impacted POP and exchange email services has been resolved, and the majority of customers were able to access their mailboxes and receive new email from about 7:45am this morning”. But it seems many customers are still experiencing difficulties.

Steve Sherlock, founder of car rental business Oodles.com.au, told SmartCompany that his business has not be able to receive emails since 9am yesterday.

“It means we have not been able to receive any emails for over 24 hours. Basically 100% of our business is done online and we don’t provide a call centre. Not being able to receive and reply to customer service emails is not a great look for our brand,” he said.

“There must be literally thousands of businesses experiencing the same problem. It’s pretty frustrating. If I had any hair I’d probably be pulling it out.”

A company spokesman says: “The underlying issue was resolved overnight but we do have some ongoing issues that are still impacting about 50% of our customers.”

“Our technicians are working on resolving this with the highest priority. We are making some progress.”

“At this stage, no emails will be lost. All of the incoming mail has been queued for delivery…although it may take some time given the volume of mail.”

Melbourne IT says it has more than 350,000 customers in its business and consumer division.