Disruption drags on for some Telus email customers

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Some Telus customers still don’t have reliable email service, and they have no idea why.

Three weeks ago freelance journalist Jorge Castillo went without email for four days.

Email is crucial in his line of work and the latest problem has made crafting a single message on his laptop an ordeal.

“I keep signing in, trying to write an email, the thing kicks me out, and I have to sign in again,” he explains. He repeats this process until he can stay logged in long enough to draft and send an email.

Telus reported a widespread outage Aug. 15th. after outside workers accidentally took telus.net offline when they were trying to repair data storage equipment.

Telus says only a small percentage of customers are continuing to have problems.

“This stage of the restoration process has been taking longer than expected due to the complexity of data being restored,” according to the company’s website.

Castillo has been satisfied with the customer service response he’s received, but says the company’s explanations leave a lot to be desired.

“The reasons they give are sort of vague so it felt like it was pretty meaningless,” he says. “I understand there may be technical reasons behind this, maybe reasons that technically users can’t understand. But maybe a little more clarity regarding the actual problem would be helpful for people to understand more about what they’re dealing with.”

Reema Faris, another customer who is still experiencing issues, agrees the company has been frustratingly unclear.

“It seems like it must have been a pretty big something that happened, so I’m really curious as to what that something is and why it’s taken so long to fix,” she says.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that the other two people in her household aren’t having the same problems she is.

Faris also went entirely without email for days after the initial outage in August.

With files from Alison Bailey and Lasia Kretzel