Telus Offers Credits To Customers Who Lost Email Service

Telus is crediting customers who have lost email service over the last several days.

“We are in the process of crediting all customers that have been affected as a token of our sincere apology for this inconvenience and disruption to their service," the company states. 

Service is still down for some paid customers in British Columbia and Alberta, the two provinces hit by the outage that began last Thursday.

In a statement posted Monday evening, the telecom said that while “90 per cent of customer accounts have been restored and are fully functional, we are focused on the remaining 10 per cent of accounts that still need to be fully restored. “  

However, that number is being disputed by users who are still without service. 

“We are still down,” writes one in a report posted on downdetector on Wednesday afternoon. “90% is nonsense. These numbers are wrong. Damage control should not mean fibbing.” 

 Another writes: "I've had no emails since last Wed. (it's now Tues evening). I started being able to access my Telus webmail on Monday, but only new emails as of that day were visible. So, I have still yet to see all of my emails from Wed. to Sunday, and I still have no access to telus on my desktop."

The outage reportedly was caused when Dell EMC, which provides data storage cloud services to Telus, was repairing failed equipment on Thursday. However, one user writes: “This is starting to look like more of a malicious hack rather than a "server error. If all it would take is replacement of hardware and rebooting the system this should be done by now.”

People apparently lost data as well as service. On Monday, one customer wrote on downdetector: “I am missing all 3000 plus emails!! Will these be returned??”

Telus states that it has “tripled our resources by bringing in industry-leading data recovery experts to help execute this two-step process:

  1. "Data recovery: Our teams are taking great care to recover the important data of each individual customer with the data recovery experts we have engaged.
  2. Data restoration: The aim of this process is to re-establish and merge our customers’ historical data into their webmail-only accounts, and then we will work to reactivate full email access via email clients like smartphone apps and desktop clients."
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