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Shaw says outage that deleted incoming emails an isolated incident

Shaw Communications says it doesn’t expect a repeat of an email outage Thursday that saw incoming messages deleted from customer accounts.
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Brad Shaw, CEO of Shaw Communications, talks with shareholders before addressing the company's annual meeting in Calgary on Jan. 9, 2013. The company's Internet service had a major 'interruption' this week that led to the loss of thousands of emails by its B.C. customers.

Shaw Communications says it doesn’t expect a repeat of an email outage Thursday that saw incoming messages deleted from customer accounts.

Shaw spokesman Chethan Lakshman said about 70 per cent of Shaw email customers were affected by the problem, which began when technicians were attempting fix an email delay Thursday morning.

“While we were fixing that problem we had a technical issue and all emails in our customers’ inbox became deleted,” Lakshman said.

The email disruption lasted about 12 hours and while company was able to recover data related to the emails, such as the sender and time the email was sent, the content was not recoverable, Lakshman said.

He added the company is working with customers to ensure they receive the details related to their lost email messages.

“Customers are understandably frustrated and concerned,” he said. “But once we’ve had the chance to explain to them what happened and that they would be receiving the details of their deleted emails, including the senders and the time that the email was sent, they were satisfied they could handle the follow up.”

Lakshman said the email outage is considered an isolated incident and is not expected to occur again.

Shaw has 1.9 million Internet users, most situated in Western Canada.

Read more from The Vancouver Sun