BT, the UK’s largest broadband provider experienced problems yesterday when a security update seemingly caused customers emails to be diverted to an internal email address. Customers only became aware of the issue when the inbox of Steve Webb became full and emails started bouncing back to their senders.
BT advised that the account was fortunately an internal account used for test purposes, rather than that of some poor unsuspecting customer. They did not however provide details of how this incident had occurred in the first place. In a statement, BT said,
“A small number of customers reported an issue sending emails earlier. Sorry about this, it’s fixed now,”
“The mailbox in the delivery failure notification was for internal/test use and appeared in error, sorry for any confusion that caused.”
Upon contacting the telecom’s provider, customers were advised that the problem was system wide and that it could take up to 24 hours to rectify. Fortunately, BT managed to resolve the issue in the much more acceptable time frame of around three hours.
A customer service advisor mentioned that the problem is believed to have occurred after a security update took place on Tuesday afternoon. The update was supposed to reduce spam, although poor Steve Webb probably felt very spammed by the sheer number of customer emails hitting his inbox yesterday. BT have since rolled back the update to rectify the fault, so far it is believed to have remedied the issue, with customers able to once again send emails to their intended recipients.
BT are not the only company to have suffered as a result of maintenance recently. Web hosting firm 123-reg has reportedly accidentally deleted the websites of a number of small business customers here in the UK .
123-Reg say they were performing a clean up of some of their VPS systems, when a coding error deleted customer’s websites. It has not been determined whether 123-Reg keep a backup of all of their customer’s data, although it is believed that they do not have access to every customer’s website.
A spokesperson for the company said: “Many of our customers keep their own backups. We are currently working with a team of experts on data recovery.”
Customers are understandably very angry about this mistake as it has cost them business. Many have expressed dissatisfaction with the way in which the problem had been dealt with. Many complained about having difficulties getting hold of the company to find out what was going on and one customer said;
“There must be some information available right? What exactly are they working on?” asked another. “We need details as we need to start planning on how to salvage anything.”
123-Reg sent an email out to customers on Sunday night which said they ‘begun copying recovered VPS images to new hosts’. They will in future audit all of their automated scripts to prevent customer websites being deleted again without human approval.