Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Telus to credit customers, working ‘around the clock’ on email fail

Telus will at least credit customer bills for the email failure that hit their system last Thursday during maintenance, a problem the company is still working “around the clock” to rectify.
0208-telus.jpg
Telus Corp. reported a fourth-quarter profit of $282 million as its revenue improved nearly five per cent compared with a year ago.

Telus will at least credit customer bills for the email failure that hit their system last Thursday during maintenance, a problem the company is still working “around the clock” to rectify.

“We let our customers down and this is not the level of service they expect or deserve from us,” Tony Geheran, Telus chief customer officer, said in a statement.

“We are contacting residential and small-business customers directly with details of their bill credits within the next 48 hours,” Geheran said, acknowledging Telus “must do everything in our power to regain their trust.”

Telus attributed the failure to a flawed repair procedure to fix an equipment failure by its service vendor, DellEMC, in the early hours of Aug. 15.

In a statement, Telus said most customers got email access back Aug. 16, but later experienced “performance issues,” and restoring individual mailboxes proved to be complex and time-consuming.

“We have hundreds of team members working quite literally around the clock to restore the affected servers,” Geheran said.

As part of the fix, Telus enabled a webmail service on new servers allowing customers to send and receive new messages while data from their accounts is recovered.

Geheran, in the latest statement, said there is a risk that emails and contacts might be lost if it enables the use of mail apps such as the ones provided on smartphones.

“Our top priorities remain to fully resolve the disruption for those restricted to webmail, make this right for affected customers and ensure this never happens again,” Geheran said.