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Similkameen business owner affected by Telus outage for two weeks

Franchise owner of HR Block Teresa DeWit says Telus “dropped the ball” in informing clients
18207267_web1_190829-KER-Telus-Outage

Even Keremeos hasn’t escaped the Telus network outage.

Teresa DeWit, franchise owner of H&R Block, said she hasn’t had email service for two weeks now — much longer than the five days the company apologized for Monday in a statement attributing the problem to a “hardware repair procedure.”

“We were without email service and it was longer than the five days. It was intermittent prior to that and then we would login and it would kick us back out,” she said. “The next thing we knew, we couldn’t get in at all. Now we can get in, but we can’t send anything.”

UPDATE: Telus to issue bill credits to email service customers affected by outage

When DeWit called Telus to find out what was happening, she said she was connected to their automated system, which said it was receiving too many calls to answer her. It also didn’t have an automated message notifying her what the problem was. She was left wondering what was happening until she saw the news reports.

“I just feel like Telus dropped the ball. They did not notify everybody or their customers that they are having problems and they are trying to fix it. What does it take to notify, especially their business clients? If anything else, the first people they should have contacted or find some way of notifying was businesses — beyond the news, instantly.”

On Aug. 19, Telus issued a statement promising to offer bill credits for the service loss.

“While Telus technicians continue to work around the clock to completely restore email access to the remaining users who do not yet have full functionality, today TELUS is communicating with all affected customers with details to help remedy the email outage,” it reads.

READ MORE: New X-ray machine at the South Similkameen Health Centre will be up and running after Labour Day

“We are providing bill credits to all active TELUS.net customers who have been affected by this disruption,” said Telus chief customer officer, Tony Geheran in the statement.

“We are contacting residential and small-business customers directly with details of their bill credits within the next 48 hours. 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.”

As of Wednesday morning, DeWit said she still hasn’t heard anything from the company about when the situation will be remedied.

“I think they did a bad job this time,” she added. “In the past, there has always been some sort of notification even if you make that phone call to them, there would be an automated message saying Telus is experiencing whatever the issue was and they are working on it as fast as possible and they will keep you updated through the phone — there wasn’t anything like that.”

To report a typo, email: editor@keremeosreview.com.

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