From just after 0900 through till nearly 1800, all my company email stopped working – inbound, outbound, everything.
At first, you’re unaware of the scale of the problem – an email gets bounced, it happens. But then you notice, after 30 mins or so, that every email is failing, and you’ve had no incoming either.
My internet connection was functioning fine, and so were personal emails. It had to be my email hosting provider, Fasthosts, at fault.
I check out their website for information, but there’s no news. I try to call their helpdesk, and I’m sitting in a queue for over 10 minutes before I give up. Something must be seriously wrong.
So I turn to Twitter. And now I KNOW…..I am not alone.
Twitter is a chorus of frustration and anger, with page after page of Fasthosts customers like me, full of questions and rage and threats to leave the provider forever. And amongst the angst, there is a light sprinkling of tweats from Fasthosts themselves, acknowledging that..
“this email issue is still ongoing for some customers, once again apologies for any inconvenience.”
By the evening, the service was restored, but for Fasthosts’ customers, their faith was most certainly not. As I browsed Twitter the following morning, I found another whole barrage of complaints about a similar outage only the week before. I had been lucky enough to escape that, but the Twitterlog had alerted me.
Since then, I’ve had no personal email or tweat of apology from Fasthosts, even after I tweated them directly.
What I did get was a polite and eager telephone call from UK Fast, a rival hosting provider who clearly kept a keen eye on market sentiment and possible opportunities.
For 24 hours, Twitter has facilitated an all but real-time account of the lifecycle of loyalty – a story of how quickly customers can lose faith, not just in the quality of service, but also in the attitude of the service provider towards repairing the fault. And the whole sorry saga washed out in the full glare of the public.
See for yourself….http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23%20fasthosts
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