Public Announcement
Filed under: BigPond, consumer, customer service
As you may have seen from our Twitter updates, due to an earlier internal systems issue, some online services have been unavailable but BigPond email has been restored for the majority of customers and other services are being progressively restored now.
I’d like to apologise to customers who may have been impacted by this issue as we understand the inconvenience it has been causing.
However, protecting our customers’ privacy has been a priority. That’s why as a precaution we disabled our BigPond email, Online Billing, BigPond Self Care and My Account functions and the team has been working around the clock to restore these services.
We will also be resetting the passwords of around 60,000 customers whose password or user ID may have been inadvertently displayed. We are expecting the actual number of customers whose user id and/or password details were displayed to be significantly less than this.
Customers who cannot log into their BigPond accounts or need passwords reset, should contact us on 133 933 anytime. We will also be proactively contacting impacted customers; however it will take some time. We will also keep our Twitter customers updated here twitter.com/telstra and we’ll post more here as information comes to hand.
Again my sincere apologies to all customers that have been impacted. Rest assured, a full investigation is underway so we can put in place measures to stop this happening again.
Regards,
Peter Jamieson
UPDATE: Sunday 11 December.
Thank you to everyone for the feedback here. We will publish all the comments tomorrow, however for now please know we continue to work on a full investigation into the matter. We take the security of our customer information extremely seriously.
Our BigPond email site is now available for the majority of our customers.
To address the queries regarding resetting passwords, if you can access your email, online bill or Telstra My Account, your password has not been re-set and you can continue to use it. However, we encourage people to regularly change their password as a security precaution.
If you are prompted to re-set your password you will need to call us on 133 933 to do so. Unfortunately we are experiencing delays in answering calls due to high call volumes at the moment. We sincerely apologise if we do keep you waiting and will get through to you as soon as soon as we can.
We’ll keep our TEX blog updated with information as it comes to hand.
UPDATE: Monday 12 December.
Hi all, our apologies to those who’ve had to endure long waits on the phone trying to get through to us – rest assured we are trying to get to all customers as quickly as we can. I want to address some of the queries you’ve sent through in response to Peter’s comments.
Email should be back up and running for the majority of our customers. If your password has been reset you will need to call us on 133 933 to activate. If you can access your email, online bill or Telstra My Account, your password has not been re-set and you can continue to use it. However, we encourage people to regularly change their password as a security precaution.
We reset BigPond passwords for a number of customers as a precaution and will be contacting impacted customers directly to work through how best to assist them. If anyone has any concerns please contact us on 1800 991 053.
We’ve had feedback from some customers who have reported getting ‘phishing’ scam emails. These are email scams that try to get personal or financial information from customers. Typically these emails urge the receiver to visit a convincing-looking fake web page and enter personal or financial information.
Please remember that Telstra and BigPond will never send unsolicited emails asking for you to provide sensitive information like your passwords, credit card details, personal information or any other account verification. There’s some more information here.
I’ll keep you updated on more information as it comes to hand.
“protecting our customers’ privacy has been a priority”
You can’t honestly be saying that with a straight face…
Quite. It would have been considerably more honest to have said, ‘ensuring a good return for our shareholders and paying our CEO absurd amounts of money has always been our priority. Our customers? Meh…’
All’s well that ends well. I have just changed my password..will I have to change it again?
As a customer with an internet, home phone, mobile and Tbox bundle I want to know what is being done to let me know if my personal information has been accessed? How is Telstra going to compensate me for the risk that I am now faced with? What will Telstra do to keep my and the other 60,000 loyal customers’ business?
Has Telstra/Bigpond been hacked?
yes by me lol
Not good enough Telstra..Am seriously thinking of changing providers!!
.Our information should be safe no matter what!! I pay for your service & had to go without emails for 24 hrs!!
Will our passwords for net connections be changed?
You don’t understand the inconvenince. You only think you do.
I still can’t get my email.
No use sending me an email – it don’t work.
Great idea making a phone number available for people but it advises in the message to wait if you have a problem with your email account. Yep great service….not. Still have no email available….why Telstra?
Hi Debi, We’re sorry for any inconvenience they may have experienced over the weekend. Just a note to let you know I’ve asked that one of our local teams get in touch with you as soon as possible to check that everything on your account and access to email is ok now.
My email program can not log into mail.bigpond.com, It say “Please verify that both the username and password are correct for your mail server.”
I have retried entering the username and password and this message keeps popping up , does this mean I need to reset my password?. and if so, does this mean that I’m one of the 60,000 customers whose account was compromised, and in compromised I mean, has my password been compromised, because this password is used elsewhere !. please advise.
P.S. I would normally click on the “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail, but I will not be able to.
P.S.S. If i reset my ADSL modem will it lose connection due to this password problem?.
Hi Michael. I’ve asked that one of our local teams get in touch with you as soon as possible to check that everything on your account and access to email is ok now. We’re sorry for any inconvenience they may have experienced Michael. Brendan.
Peter,
I know personally you take customer service seriously.
However, an “internal systems issue” is a bit simplistic for a lack of security for customer data.
I have a bundle. However I’m not sure if I’ve been affected or not.
If this is from a third party as the rumour mill forums are suggesting, then it proves to reinforce how disappointed customers are becoming with outsourcing.
This is not good enough Telstra. I expect Telstra to ALWAYS ensure that my personal details are secure. You say “However, protecting our customers’ privacy has been a priority.” If our privacy was a priority this would never happen in the first place. Time to go to another provider I think. I can no longer trust Telstra, which is a shame considering they are only just starting to treat customers right.
Try posting stuff on your website a little sooner or on Facebook. More people would have a clue why’s going on then instead of using that bull excuse for a site called twitter.
Outside of that I find Telstra is doing a great job. Just need to keep your customers better informed
This public announcement has come more than 25 hours too late. The big red notice at bigpond.com didn’t appear until Saturday afternoon. Throughout the disruption the Service Status page for cable showed ‘Mail’ with a green light.
As Executive Director Customer Service, surely your first thought should have been to advise customers of what was happening. But you wait until it is all over, more than a day later.
I rely on email for work and spent ages searching the web to find out what why I could not access email or log in. The information when I found it sure didn’t come from Telstra.
Just waited 55 minutes on the phone to have a customer service operator with a phoney American accent sitting off shore inform me that Telstra is quote “upgrading” its system – I advised her of the press release – but not they still cannot give me access to my email – so 25 plus hours gone and several days were it didn’t work properly -before that. Telstra should at least come clean and make sure their call centre know the full facts instead of fabricating stories.
You need to sack some of your IT dudes or incompetent outsource partners – every bigpond customer should be given a credit
why is live chat not working.
Great. And how will you be compensating customers for your monumental stuff-up?
It makes reading your threats of late-payment fees on our accounts all the more galling…
Not just ‘inconvenient’.
Not good enough.
It meant that I was unable to work. If you were really sorry, you would be doing more than just empty apologies.
Apologies? Not good enough.
Having your customers’ private information out there is just not good enough. That you had to be told about it –yes — not good enough.
So what are the arrangements to compensate people? And why should we stay with bigpond and not go with one of your competitors?
We have been waiting for email re-connection since Friday. After 45 min on hold at 3 pm today we got to talk with someone. After 35 min re-setting all account details and passwords we go no further. Told that Telstra would sent an email to let us know when our email was working again (derrrrr!!!). Then told would get a call on our mobile to say when all OK. Almost 9 hours later (and no call) we re-called. Having explained what had happened and asked when we would be connected again, the Telstra operator ‘went silent’ and would not answer any questions, just pretended not be be there until 10 min later we hung up. Have since re-called and been on hold for 38 min and counting – SO JUST WHERE THE HELL IS THE SERVICE WE PAY FOR??????????????????????
update – got through to a technician named Dan – very helpful, but did not know about Entourage for Mac – “hold while I get some more advice” well, 30 minutes into hold, after 12.30 and nothing but music playing———– HOW SOOTHING NOT!!!!!!!!!!! SO JUST WHEN IS OUR EMAIL GOING TO WORK?????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????? ????????????????????????????????? ?????
Hi Mike, Really sorry you had to endure this. I’ve asked for a local team to follow this up as a priority and call you asap. Brendan
I still have no email? I called Saturday and waited 1hr and 10mins on the phone but hung up after not speaking to anyone (because I have better thing to do than have to chase up Telstra after there stuff up) Then called again yesterday and after 1hr and 15mins finally got to speak to someone.Not that it was avery helpful, he text me my password……um I already know my password it just dosn’t work…..Telstra will text me when my email is sevice is restored, within the day….hhmmm now its Monday and still no email WTF! TELSTRA
Hi Kellie, I’ve requested you get a call back as soon as possible. Kellie, I apologise for any inconvenience they may have experienced this weekend. Brendan.
Hi Kellie, Pleased to hear your email is all working now. Bec just let me know.
I had a very similar experience to Kellie. Tried calling Telstra on Saturday and Sunday and found thayt there was lengthy wait times. Tried again this afternoon. After waiting 22 minutes, I spent another 25 minutes speaking to a very unhelpful person. The consultant texted me my existing password and didn’t seem to know how to solve the problem I had raised which was that I still can’t access my emails.
I requested a call back tonight and will wait to see if that actually eventuates.
Can this get any worse? Maybe! Just rang tech support and – after only 15 min wait – was told that I could not get email because of an internet outage in my area!!! Explained that I had internet and could send – but not receive – emails (this is day 4 and we are trying to run a business!!!!!). Was asked what number I had dialled (tech support – derrrrrr!) and then told that I would be put thro’ to a tech person – hey, so who was I speaking to at tech support – the cleaner maybe? Might explain the stupid response! Well Telstra, hats off, you have done it again! After 45 min on hold I give in and give up….. you win!
Keep my bloody emails!!!!!!
I will move to a provider who provides a service.
Hi Mike, I have organised for a local team to call you this morning, Brendan.
Monday night and still no email facility.absolutely terminal to my business and after numerous calls and hand balling amongst off shore call centers no closer to a solution. our domain name has been deleted through all of this and no one can answer how or why? is there any chance someone at telstra/bigpond can fix the problem???
come on Peter your name is at the bottom of the email advising someone will be in touch and yet we have to keep calling them!!!!
what kind of customer service do you call that? I could co pare it to how we assist our customers, but as they cannot contact us, how can I know.
so Brendan, I look forward to receiving your standard ‘someone in our local team’ will contact you shortly to do absolutely nothing to assist, and thank me for my time.
Hi Shaun, I’d be happy to help, however your email bounced and domain not active. Please send me you account details and a contact number if you still need help today. Use this online form. Brendan
I understand that you have had major issues with a security breach of Bigpond and billing, but what I cannot understand is the system that you have put in place to rectify it. The way that you are treating your customers beggars belief. Calling a 133 number and being told that you may have to wait for anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes to have a password reset does not help the situation. In this day and age I would have thought that you would have a special help page set up, preferably one which actually does help your customer. My idea would be that it would be tamper proof and could direct me to a page where I could enter my DOB and then quickly have my password reset.
I am also concerned because I receive my bill online and if I cannot access it then the payment will be late. I would hope that you will waive all late payment fees that have been caused by your lack of security.
Thanking you in anticipation of one day getting my Email service back
Hello Brendan. Thank your for the feedback, and I will pass it on for you today. Please do get in touch with your account and contact details if you still need help today. You can use this form. Brendan.
Absolutely disgusted with Telstra. Have not had email since Friday night. Been ringing all weekend and right up until last night (Monday). Get the same recorded message that there is a 20 minute wait. Bahaha, what a joke. Get told to wait to talk someone. Wait for almost an hour. Still have not got to talk to anyone. STILL NO EMAIL!!!!! What good is the tick box at the end of this comment to “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail” when we can’t receive it? This better get fixed soon. NOT HAPPY!!
Hi Sue, Just an update to tell you that your complaint has assigned this complaint to Stacey. She will call you very soon.
Thanks for the new password. DOES NOT WORK! Waiting another day. Cannot wait for my contract to be over. Will be leaving Telstra.
Spoke to Stacey this morning. He reset my password and my email is now working. Thankyou.
This does not mean that I am happy with Telstra by any means. We have experienced nothing but problems with this company since day 1 when they messed up our user name and would not change it. Almost every acct we have received from you has had problems.
Thanks again Stacey.
Hi there,
I’d like to thank Telstra for the care and utmost respect they have shown to all the loyal and, at times, irate customers.
This has been another shambles Telstra has been exposed to.
I have yet to be contacted by Telstra to explain what exactly happened and how I am supposed to work around the issue of having no email access whatsoever, when I rely on it so much.
Sorry, I apologise I was contacted via email…which I couldn’t access remember.
If it wasn’t for my proactive actions to request a new password (which did seem to allow my access) I would still be waiting for the contact.
I feel for the customers who struggle a little with technology and just want things to work when at the end of the day they are paying a superior price for what should be a superior network and service.
Now that all my details have been exposed to the whole world what should my actions be?
If you, through extensive investigations and external advice, etc, manage to sort out the reason for this blunder and/or you find the person or tool responsible how will you deal with it? I’m sure you will take responsible action but it was our details that were exposed by your incompetents.
How will we be compensated???
Brendan,
no domain active is the PROBLEM. it was deleted by your subsidiary and we have no email facilities as a result. into our 5th day of no email. what are you going to do Brendan?????? i have no email, no one knows who turned it off, the host company is based in the Phillipines and will only reply to emails, allegedly of course as we have had no response to the requests sent on our behlaf by your sales staff!!!!! i can assure you Brendan, we will be looking elsewhere once it gets sorted out and then we can discuss compensation for disruption to our business and lost business. this will not end here i can assure you.
where is Peter Jamieson during all this???? his name is on the bottom of the email stating we should call 13POND if the matter is urgent. would have thought that amongst the 15+ people I have been transferred to, one might have been him as i reckon I have spoken to most of the employees.
i will wait to see if I hear from you Brendan or someone else in the ivory tower at Telstra.
Shaun, Can I have a contact number please?
Have been unable to log in to my email for 3 days. Internet was totally out. Took me 2 phone calls (waiting for approximately 45 minutes on hold) for Telstra to understand that we had no internet at all only to be told they didn’t know when the internet would be restored and that I would be sent an SMS when connection was back on. Could give me no idea of time frame (days, weeks?????). Still have not received an SMS but internet is now back on. I cannot, however, log into my email. I have phoned Telstra 3 times this morning. Waited on hold approximately 40 minutes each time until the Telstra music stopped. No one spoke on the other end and I was hung up on!!!!! This has happened twice and I am on the phone for the third time as I write this. Very frustrating and time consuming. Currently have been on hold for 25 minutes and counting. This is ridiculous! I work from home and this has severely impacted on my work. Can someone at Telstra please contact me by phone (as no email!) so this problem can be resolved? My phone line has been tied up enough while I have been hold and I am missing important work calls.
Hi Cheryl. I’ve asked for a local team to call you asap. Brendan
Have had two calls this morning purporting to be from Telstra requesting information for our ‘new’ service. I hung up both times. Also received an email from Telstra but am not convinced it is legitimate as phone no was not in the same format as usually displayed so reported it as spam. I’m concerned that confidence in Telstra is now very low and up to date information is not available on the Bigpond front page keeping us informed. Going to the Technical Information page for advice just gives an error message.
I phoned Friday to say I could not get into my Telstra account. I am able to use my email after waiting 24 hours to fix your problem. I have a Phone account to pay and can not do so as I can’t get into my account and I do not get a paper bill. The girl I spoke to Friday took over my computer and changed passwords and user names several times in the end she just toldme a Tech would contact me Monday. Well surprise surprise it is now 3.50pm Tuesday and no contact from anyone so I phoned and he could not help either so has me on callback for 5pm today. I WILL NOT BE PAYING any late fees for my Bundle Account. Do any of these people you have on the phones know anything about what is happening??????
Hi Carrol. Send me a message here if you still need help.
Wednesday 12.17 am and still no Email or password reset. Did chat to a lovely lady yesterday at about 9am who sent me a text of my current password which I had already tried to log on with. Told her it would not work but she assured me that it would. surprise surprise, I was right and Telstra was wrong. Not happy, not happy at all.
Sorry Brendan, I’ll follow this up with a note to the case manager for you.
Told the same lady that I could not pay my bill because it is sent to me on Email which I can no longer access. Tried to get an assurance that I would not get slugged with a late fee. Could not even get that but I will fight any attempt to get it off me. I think Telstra are making enough money making people use 1800 numbers to contact them to fix a problem of Telstra’s creation.
My problem was very brief and minor – couldn’t send or receive email on Saturday, but it was all okay again on Sunday with no information lost. However, my husband (on his laptop in the same room as me) has lost his whole email account and can’t send or receive emails. Before we realised it was a Telstra issue, we thought it was his laptop, and tried all sorts of things to fix it but nothing worked. We assume it is part of the Telstra problem! It is now 1 am on Wednesday morning – my email account is working fine, his isn’t. Is there any way of finding out if it is anything to do with Telstra, or his own computer system?
I would like to compliment Telstra’s staff on their patience. My husband lost his PUK code on his Iphone, and we phoned Telstra to find out what to do. “Ron” was very helpful and patient, and was also able to help hubby with extending the number of times his Iphone rings, which had been driving him nuts with the missed calls!
When all this happened, I went to Bigpond.com to see what was going on. There was the most brief and uninformative paragraph on the home page and on the service disruptions page, a yellow coloured light to indicate ‘some known problems’ rather than the red colour that meant widespread outage. I can’t imagine what might happen that would make red appropriate if this wasn’t a grave enough situation.
Also, the bigpond homepage has ‘headlines’ with NO mention of what was going on within their system when all the major news organisations had it on top of their pages.
Shame on you! The first thing you should have done is paste a big banner on the home page with all the links and information you have on the issues posted promptly. As you managed it, we had to go to elsewhere to find information.
This same situation is why I left Vodafone for Telstra. Hiding the obvious only makes you look worse.
Get it together and be HONEST, transparent and on the front foot when things go wrong. You made a bad situation worse…
I had the same problem as you regarding my name in my email being spelt incorrectly. They recommended using my first name and surname as correctly spelt in my billing account but then somehow manged to drop a t from my name when they setup my email account which is also the primary account used for Internet access. This is after they failed to turn up to connect my phone service and then Internet at my new house on the originally agreed date that had been carefully scheduled by us. When I went to get this changed they said they would have to disable my service for another 3 days after all the extra time I had waited. Of course after waiting so long this was unacceptable so now I have an extra email address which I was duly charged for which I then had to get refunded. When I renewed my contract recently (only because Telstra are the only company in my area that offer the ADSL2+ speed that I need) they still could not do this. You just give up in the end. Thankfully they don’t try to charge for the extra mailbox now.
Hi Matthew, I’ve organised a call back for you.
Thanks.
Thursday, still no Email, and still no contact from Telstra Bigpond, I have finally given up, yes you have won, I will no longer be posting, phoning, or attempting to Email you. Anything in my inbox can stay there undisturbed for eternity or until someone hacks it. I will not be paying any bills until I receive it through the postal service and I will be deducting any charges that I deem inapproriate. I will sign up for Gmail which is free and seems to have a better security system.
Sorry Brendan, I’ve asked what going on and for the team to call you right away.
Hi Brendan. Great to hear Stacey has been in touch and helped you get your modem all configured and working. Brendan
Action…….. I received a call today on my mobile and this was followed up with a new password. I understand the frustration and workload of the customer service team when trying to please all of the people all of the time. I am now confident that I will be able to reset my router and password and all should be well.
I suppose that the learnings from all of this would be for Telstra/Bigpond to have a business contingency plan to alleviate the frustration for customers and customer service people. Something along the lines of a help home page where users could log on using their password with other means of ID, and then this would redirect to a super safe page where we could change our own password. Anyway, alls well that ends well and I hope that all customers get their Email access back as soon as possible.
That’s fantastic news Brendan! Glad it is sorted.
I haven’t experienced any outages, but received a call from an operator on Thursday asking for my d.o.b to confirm my identity before proceeding, but in light of the security breach I didn’t give it. She gave me the same 1800 number listed on this page and told me to call it as it involves my private homephone account. Given the numbers match I can see this was legit, but do I really need to call if everything’s ok?
I find that this breach to be of major concern. I have a silen home phone number due to the type of work I am involved in and I have tried numerous times to seek a positive reassurance that my privacy has not been compromised – without any success.
Told on 3 occassions that if I havent been contacted then all is good. Then told on another 2 occasions over the weekend that nobody is 100% sure yet and it was a work in progress.
When I called to transfer my services to another provider I was told that I would be liable to contract breach fees. Last time I checked, a breach of privacy constituted a breach of contract. Where is Bigpond’s liability.
I cannot get a straight answer from anyone – perhaps the TIO may be able to assist?
Please help – this is my last attempt to seek a clear answer!
The people at Telstra are a pack of incompetents.
I have just cancelled my mother’s cable broadband account because they cannot even get a simple billing procedure right. After 8 phone calls regarding the problem, they still couldn’t sort it out. During the last call, the supposed senior supervisor from Telstra thought he was a smart-arse, and he treated me like some sort of idiot.
Next week, after I make other arrangements for another provider to take over the service for my own account, I will cancel my cable broadband account as well. I will also cancel my landline phone account from Telstra and most likely accept a bundle from another provider.
I will never deal with Telstra again as long as I live… What a disgrace !
Hi Ken, I can see you are upset with your recent experience with us and I would like to have somoene call you. If you would like that, please would you use this form to send me your contact number and account details.
Hey this is not good enough, trying to offload a couple of K of customers!??? Disappointed! My email still isn’t working properly!
I have a complaint and would like Peter to contact me directly.
As I can see I am not the only one with a complaint I might be waiting a while….
Peter you have sent me four, yes four, emails saying someone would be in contact to resolve my issue. That hasn’t happened…
GET IN CONTACT so we can work this out….
REF: 120417-014524
Greg, I’ve forwarded this to a local support team for you. Brendan
Worst service I have ever experienced…Telstra do not respond to follow ups, do not bother to return calls, clearly this is because they know thier service is absolute rubbish and can no longer stomach the conversations this generates.
As a recommendation if you actually want to improve things…
Try keeping your appointments, don’t make them if you can’t attend them, apply some basic scheduling capability…
Stop telling your customers “We Connect” when clearly you are more capable at disconnecting existing services with other suppliers then not bothering to finish the job by attending to do the “Connect” part…
Stop telling your customers that you will respond to a complaint…you don’t…I understand this though…crap service = lots of complaints, too many to deal with would be my guess.
Thanks for a wonderful experience with a great Australian company…perhaps we should offshore the Management Team?
Hi Paul. Sorry to hear you’ve had a bunch of negative experiences with us recently. Can I help with anything? Brendan
Made the mistake of moving house and using – or trying to use – bigpond again. Moved Adsl then found new house has cable. More than 2 weeks later Telstra still can’t get us connected. Had calls from techs with “mac” issues , but when I later called tech support they had no record of a problem. Modem arrives but can’t work. Tech support could not help, went to activation section – could not explain what problem is. Now have to wait for 48 hours before someone does something. Was put thru to complaints but gave up after 2 hours on hold. Try making the management team listen to that rot for 2 hours and see how sane they are. Filled in a “satisfaction” survey for the Adsl which mentioned issues but have heard nothing.
Hi Maryanne, I’m sorry to hear you had such a bad experience trying to get your service connected – I’ve just sent you an email to follow up on this directly.