Wanadoo knocks out customer internet connections

If there is one man under pressure in the IT industry at the moment, it is the IT manager that made the mistake of rolling out firmware updates to their customers wireless internet routers at 4.30pm last Friday afternoon.

What this meant is that customers lost their internet connection. If they rebooted their router while this was happening, this corrupted the firmware of the router, rendering the customer without internet access and requiring wanadoo to send a disk to refresh the sytem of the wireless router. Customers calling Wanadoo technical support were greeted with a recorded message saying "We are updating firmware on our wireless routers, please do not turn off your router while this is happening" - er yeah, thanks for the advance warning.

As everyone knows, if you loose your internet connection, probably the first quick fix is to reboot the router. You do not usually call the technical support line to check for recorded messages. If you were unlucky enough to reboot while the updates were happening, your router would be rendered useless, with no internet access.

I can only put this down to a "grand faux pas" on behalf of the IT guy that thought he was deploying the firmware updates to his test lab. Because if any IT Director thinks that its a good idea to carry out maintenance at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon, then they deserve the Spanish archer that is El Bow.

I can only imagine the number of customers rendered without internet access. The cost from sending out flash disks and the increased burden on technical support.