The Telus Building in Toronto is pictured in this Dreamstime stock image (Dreamstime Stock image)

By Charles Lefebvre

Telus outage

Telus issuing bill credits on fifth day of email outage

Aug 20, 2019 | 11:12 AM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — Telus is issuing bill credits to affected customers following an email outage that has now lasted five days.

“We are contacting residential and small business customers directly with details of their bill credits within the next 48 hours,” said TELUS Chief Customer Officer Tony Geheran in a statement. “Restored customers will see the email in their TELUS.net inbox and customers without full functionality will receive an email in their TELUS webmail account. Where possible, we’ll also connect to customers by SMS.”

“We let our customers down, and this is not the level of service they expect or deserve from us. Our commitment to putting our customers first means we must do everything in our power to regain their trust, and this is an important step in doing so,” Geheran added. “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.”

The outage begin on August 15 following a hardware repair procedure, the company said. Telus says DellEMC, the company’s vendor, was repairing failed equipment, and a flawed repair procedure took the TELUS.net email system offline.

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The company says access to most customer email inboxes was restored on August 16, but they experienced performance issues later as customers re-engaged with the email.

For the customers that are still without email access, the company has enabled webmail on new services, allowing mailboxes to be accessible to send and receive new messages through an internet browser.

As data is recovered, old messages will be restored to the mailbox and full access will be available.

“We are providing webmail access at this time because there is a risk that emails and contacts could be lost if we enable our affected customers to use mail apps, like those on their smartphones,” Telus wrote in a statement. “We are doing everything we can to protect our customers and their data until we have a permanent fix, which is why this new function will be limited to sending and receiving new emails, and enable email forwarding to another account or platform.”

The company has set up a page which provides instructions for how to access their webmail and the latest information on the disruption.