Email Migration Failure at UK2

For the last few days, major web hosting service UK2.net has been suffering an outage that has taken its hosted e-mail service offline.  On November 12, 2009, managing director Martin Baker assured UK2.net’s customers, “We’re at the tail end of moving the emails across and should be done in no more than 24 hours.”  The failure was caused by a technical glitch when the company attempted to migrate e-mails to different server.  The migration failure has left UK2.net’s customers without e-mail, frustrating many and costing customers (especially business customers) money.

The outage began last week, and it was reportedly caused by hardware issues. Customers’ data and e-mails are safe on the hardware.  They are simply inaccessible for the time being; customers cannot send, receive, or view e-mails on the server.  When service is restored, their e-mails will be in their inboxes as usual, UK2 claims.

Will this hurt UK2.net’s business?  Almost certainly.  The outage has lasted over a week, and the first prediction from Baker and the UK2.net team was that the service would be back to normal by Sunday, November 8, 2009.  As of November 12, 2009, the service is still down.  The public relations hit that UK2.net is taking is certainly going to be seen in the near future.

If UK2.net’s current forecasts are to be believed, the e-mail service should be back to normal by Thursday, November 13, 2009.  UK2.net should certainly make every effort to meet this date, as their customers are getting increasingly frustrated by the lost time and productivity caused by this outage (for an example of the frustration, see Twitter).