iiNet’s mass outage in Perth this week was the fourth time in eight months that Lisa and Jason Spark’s business Quality Printers & Cartridges has been cut off.
iiNet’s mass outage in Perth this week was the fourth time in eight months that Lisa and Jason Spark’s business Quality Printers & Cartridges has been cut off.
A software bug was the cause of iiNet’s outage on Wednesday, which knocked out customers’ emails and even the internet service provider’s own support line for over 12 hours.
Mr and Mrs Spark recently moved their business to the Northlink Industrial Park in Gnangara, just down the road from its previous location, but since then they have run into a number of issues.
Being the first business established on the street at the time, they were the first to discover that ADSL internet wasn’t available in the area, which the NBN Company describes as a greenfields zone.
They were told they would only have immediate access to the internet if they signed up for the NBN through iiNet.
“Since we moved in eight months ago the NBN has gone down four times, which means our entire business has stopped four times,” Mrs Spark said.
“There was no phone, no internet and we couldn’t even email out to tell our clients ... who would try to call in but all they would hear was the sound of a disconnected line.
“They thought we had gone out of business. We’ve had to call back customers later to tell them we’re still here.
“We lost orders because our customers couldn’t get through to us so they went somewhere else.”
On one occasion, the company’s internet was down for nearly three days, leaving the business unable to operate.
Mr Spark told Business News that when he tried to log a fault with NBN Company he was unable to physically speak to anyone from the company.
“We had to call iiNet to log the fault with the NBN. The (iiNet representative) then told us we just had to wait for someone from the NBN to show up and fix the problem or take care of it from their end,” he said.
“It causes a lot of problems when you can’t even get a hold of who’s actually providing the service.”
Mr Spark said once the issues were raised with iiNet and subsequently logged with the NBN, he was given no timeframe for when services would be back up and running, which meant they had no estimation of when the their business would be back online.
Comment has been sought from iiNet.
