I’ve complained about Plusnet a few times in the past. They’ve variously allowed bits of my site to be deleted due to dodgy default security settings, deleted my whole site themselves, deleted my site again, changed some important configuration settings without bothering to tell anyone and contributed to trapping huz.org.uk in domain-name pergatory for nearly three weeks. On Saturday and Sunday I couldn’t connect for about 24 hours, which thankfully halted my EVE obsession but also meant I couldn’t send a very important email. I was on the verge of running out to buy a modem and shake magazines in the hope that an AOL trial CD would fall out. Before you ask, no, the “important email” wasn’t an Evemail.
Aside from that, I still insist that Plusnet are pretty good.
This time they’ve decided to up the ante with an unstoppable act of wanton destruction. Unbeknownst to me, since I couldn’t even CONNECT, the following ominous message appeared on the Service Status page on Sunday morning:
“Our network engineers are currently investigating an issue where customers are not seeing any email displayed in their mailboxes.”
Do you know why customers were not seeing any mail displayed in their mailboxes, readers?
It’s all GONE.
Yes, this evening I’ve had a quick trawl through the updates on the Service Status page. Cluelessness gradually turned to suspicious caginess which, by this evening became “oh shit guys, hope you’re sitting down: 700GB of email gone :o :(”. The story goes that some hapless employee accidentally typed a mythical “delete everything” command while mistakenly logged in to the wrong servers. The mirrored backup system did its work and dutifully replicated the change, so the backups are toast as well.
Oh dear Plusnet, oh dear. They’re sending the data to a data recovery firm, who should - since the disks were yanked out of the system, probably in a blind panic, immediately after everything was bummed - be able to recover everything.
700GB of data to be recovered, though? More like the biggest bill you’ve ever seen.
