Telus restores DSL Internet service in BC after extended outage

It’s not too often that a news story affects my workflow to the point where it’s somewhat ironic, but on Monday that happened. Telus, my home Internet service provider had been having issues all day, and reports were that it was not isolated to my house, my city or even my province. It appeared as if many Telus customers in British Columbia had been dealing with intermittent DSL service through much of Monday — and some did not have any access at all.

From a personal standpoint, I had been trying to access a wired connection at home since 9 am PDT, with limited to no success. I had been through one support call that ultimately ended up fruitless (no fault of the support person who was, incidentally, located in the Phillipines) and by early afternoon the Twitter branch of Telus’ support had ordered me a new router to play it safe.

However, as of 3 pm PDT I received a DM via Twitter from another person working the support branch there that relayed the following:

Hi Mike. At this time we are currently experiencing an outage in your region. This could be why your intrent (sic) is completely down too.

Followed by another a moment later:

We have our technicians working on this outage with no estimated time of repair. Sorry again for any inconvenience.

Twitter had been ablaze with complaints for much of the day (despite Telus’ attempts to take the customers “offline” via follow-back direct messages), and calls to support as the day had worn on have either alarmingly high wait times or have gone unanswered altogether — the latter happened to yours truly when making an attempt to reach support by phone in the early afternoon. Telus’ online chat, when users had been able to access it during brief moments of connection today, had wait times of over 2 hours before a representative would (or could) respond.

Victoria-based radio station CFAX 1070, tweeted the following comment after reaching a Telus spokesman:

Telus spokesman says Internet outage is intermittent and only affects customers attempting to log on and acquire new IP address.

CFAX 1070 then reported that a Telus customer service worker said that there were no specifics as to what was causing the problem, and that there was “no estimated time for service restoration.”

I was able to reach Shawn Hall in Telus Media Relations by phone at approximately 6 pm PDT. Hall echoed the reasoning behind the issues stemming from customers trying to acquire new IP addresses as well as “a hardware issue” and stated that the company had its “best technical minds” working on the problem and “progress is being made.”

As the outage carried into the late hours on Monday evening, reports were popping up on Twitter indicating that some Telus customers could be without service for upwards of 48 hours and that the outage was a result of the Telus network being hacked. Hall dismissed these reports as rumours, and customers were slowly seeing their access restored (including myself) as the day came to a close. However, Hall did say during that exchange that there still was no estimated time when full restoration would be completed.

Telus confirmed that the outage had been fully restored as of Tuesday morning, with Hall sending this tweet to me via direct message:

Everyone was up and running about 2:30 a.m. Pacific. Some customers will need to reboot their modems to restore service. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by this internet outage.

As for compensation for the downtime, Hall followed up with another direct message:

Yes. We will do what we can to make this right for our customers. Our first focus is on getting all of our customers restored.

There is still no official word on what sort of compensation customers could expect from the company, although some are reporting that they have been told by Telus customer service agents that they will be getting a credit on their bill for the downtime.