• by Ray Schultz , August 19, 2019

Western Canada residents lost email access — and mailbox data — when Telus’s service went down late last week.  

The outage, which has continued into Monday, was caused when Dell EMC, which provides data storage cloud services to Telus, was repairing failed equipment on Thursday, CBC reports.

Telus, a major telecom, is working to restore service and data to users. The telecom annoyed customers when it announced on Friday that most users could access their email.

That turned out to be entirely true. Service went down again. 

“Unfortunately, the issues with the remaining servers are very complex, which is why this is taking much longer than we would like. We know that our customers are frustrated, and we are incredibly sorry," a spokesman said, according to Global 'News. 

On Monday morning, the downdetector map showed heavy outages in British Columbia and Albert, with minor issues in Ontario. However, the problems may not be limited to Canada.

“My email has been down for 3/4 days in Scotland causing the need for unnecessary phone calls switches to my alternate email,” a customer writes. 

Other Monday morning posts indicate that the problem in Canada is far from resolved. 

“I am missing all 3000 plus emails!! Will these be returned??,” writes one customer.

Another writes: “still down for receiving emails but I can get access to emails received recently through webmail. It's progress at least. Also received (through webmail internet portal) a letter of apology with reference to compensation.” 

One source told CBC that Telus apparently erred by storing all its data in one place.

"One of the issues of having all of your servers in one cloud provider, and obviously Telus is learning this lesson right now, is that if that cloud provider has an issue, then you've lost everything," said John Zabiuk, an instructor in the applied information systems technology program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, CBC reports.

Zabluk adds that this episode “would have to be a pretty catastrophic failure. If they are having to restore customers mailboxes then that means they've lost all of the data basically.”