iiNet blames hardware fault for six-day email brown-out

iiNet has revealed that a hardware problem is behind the five-days-and-counting email brown-out experienced by customers of its Netspace sub-brand.

In an email to iTnews that ironically produced a “delivery delayed” error half an hour after we received a reply, the ISP said, “We have identified a performance problem with the hardware that stores email for Netspace customers which has impacted around 20 percent of customers.”

A company spokesperson told iTnews that iiNet company is working to address the issue and “also working to move affected Netspace mailboxes to a more resilient platform.  We have to approach this gradually, as moving mailboxes also impacts the performance of the platform.”

“We are approximately 35 percent of the way through this process, and we will continue to provide updated progress reports to affected customers via our Network Status page,” the spokesperson added.

Those progress reports are scant: an update to the page adds nothing more than the information sent to iTnews and still offers no time to resolution.

iTnews believes the incident could run beyond Christmas: today is day six of the brown-out, iiNet admits it’s 35 percent into the fix and there’s just five business days until Australia clocks off for the better part of a month.

There’s some good news in the form of iiNet’s promise that data loss is out of the question.

“Note that this is an access issue and emails are still stored and have not been lost,” the company spokesperson said.

iiNet acquired Netspace in 2010 and iiNet was acquired by TPG in 2015. TPG did not respond to iTnews' questions regarding the reasons Netspace runs a discrete email system.

UPDATE: 9AM December 19. iiNet's status page now reports that the migration is complete, rather ahead of the timeframe we guessed.