DSL Extreme → Customer Service FAIL during major outage 11/15

About 4:30pm yesterday DSLX experienced a rare and lengthy outage in southern California. After two hours on 'speakerphone' hold I was disconnected; fortunately I was near the phone to hear a belated announcement about 'an AT&T outage'.

What was so unexpected and unprofessional was that no one in DSLX thought to update the Network Status message! My experience with large IT shop help desks is that Rule One is to keep the customers informed ..... quickly! Someone in a position of 'authority' should have a) updated the phone message and b) updated the HD status board so that all of the CSRs know why the phone queue is exploding.

Seriously DSLX, besides reviewing your HD processes and supervisory personnel performance, how about doing something simple and obvious like moving the status message to the 'PRESS 1' position on the call director! Sheesh.

Our sincere apologies that we fell short of notification expectations during last nights outage which effected some DSL clients in Southern California. We are in agreement on all points. As you can from the network status message which was posted later in the evening the outage was caused by a partial failure of the data centers air conditioning systems which caused warmer than normal conditions and heat issues with one of our routers. This of course caused an abnormal spike call volume for a Saturday evening and significantly longer than normal hold times. We do apologize for that.

During the outage our engineering team was sending internal notifications to the team as they normally would during an outage. There was an unfortunate oversight / breakdown of communication between the support and engineering teams as both thought the other had posted the customer facing network status update. They were in the heat of the moment (no pun intended) and unfortunately this was an oversight. We do once again apologize for the oversight and any inconvenience. In general the team is very good about keeping our clients up to date. We will work hard to continue that and help ensure that the breakdown in communication doesn't happen again in the future. Thanks for your anticipated understanding.