Who says that depending on technology is a good? It’s something we all take for granted. When something goes amiss with our connectivity to the web, it sure is a jolt to the system. Helpless and frustrated are just a couple emotions that many Telus customers felt with their recent webmail outage.
No question business owners who rely on Telus webmail have a serious complaint. That level of dependency is certainly on a whole different level and isn’t really the primary discussion point here. Those folks deserve some elevated customer care from Telus which is likely in progress.
On a personal note, I can relate to the Telus webmail outage. There is never a good time to go without email for hours let alone a day or more. It’s actually hard to comprehend an outage such as Telus had and hopefully they are willing to be forthcoming with information to help alleviate nervous customers.
If I had one complaint, it was lack of communication. If I didn’t know better it seemed that Telus was more concerned about damage control than informing their customers what was going on. The reason I say this is because the Telus outage portion of their website required a log-in to your account. Who has all their passwords with them and who in most families has access to such passwords? Not everyone, that’s most likely the answer to that question.
Damage control for a brand isn’t something that Telus should be criticized over. It’s commonplace. It’s not just Telus. Do you think Freedom Mobile was quick to tell everyone in the country about their outages over the past month or so? In fact during that Freedom outage, it also included the other big cellular providers of Canada. None of them were quick to say how many customers it affected and for how long it lasted. What we have here with the Telus outage is a pretty common play from the corporate playbook.
The Telus webmail outage has received a lot of press and rightfully so. It was an epic (aka catastrophic) failure that is rarely seen. That said, if you’re not a business then perhaps the level of complaining is slightly overblown.
Telus does one thing well. They make things right. Credit is coming to our accounts and that can be assured. How much credit? That’s going to be the question. If I had to live 24-hours without webmail but was able to save a chunk of money as a result? Maybe I would take that deal. Update on this aspect of the story to come. Let’s just hope that Telus doesn’t require every affected customer to call in to initiate compensation like Freedom Mobile did.
Maybe you are considering moving more of your contact information to Google’s gmail or Microsoft’s Outlook. But in doing that, you’re getting ads and giving up some of your privacy.
In all the years Telus has been offering webmail, have outages been an issue? Maybe it’s best just to take a deep breath and realize things happen when it comes to technology. If anything, don’t you think after this, Telus will be overly safe when it comes to ensuring no more big failures? I would say so. More reliable than ever would be there likely goal moving forward.
Ultimately this Telus webmail outage was a good reminder. It should tell us (no pun intended) that being connected is everything. We depend on it so much that we forget sometimes. I think when people start seeing credit to their account the complaining is likely going to subside and everyone will move past this.
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