Internet Solutions has responded to news of widespread virtual machine outages at its MWeb Business subsidiary, confirming customers have lost data without recourse.
The firm claims the outage has been fully resolved, a point strongly refuted by angry customers in touch with ITWeb, some of whom have already indicated they are considering legal action.
The issue, described as a "system provisioning error", is "100% resolved," says Debbie Pretorius, general manager, MWeb Business. "The issue was resolved in stages, part on Friday morning and fully by Sunday afternoon."
The bad news for customers is that data is confirmed to be permanently lost. "All clients received new IP addresses as this was the quickest way to ensure the restoration of the service," Pretorius says. "Customers who do not back up their sites would be affected."
Clients are assumed to be fully responsible for their own backups, she notes. "There are no SLA clauses that would activate from this system error; however, as a gesture of goodwill we will not be invoicing clients who have our virtual machine product for July."
An MWeb Business customer who requested anonymity told ITWeb: "We have backups: of course the data is my problem, but what about the apps? It could take a couple of weeks to fully recover and test.
"The lack of communication and transparency is the worst part. The first we heard was from our customers reporting their services were offline - we escalated technical complaints immediately but had no response from the technical teams. In fact we heard nothing from MWeb until Sunday night, when they told us the servers were going to be reprovisioned."
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