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EIR HAS SAID that some of its customers have had a tranche of their emails deleted due to an error during an IT upgrade.
The emails deleted were more than 45 days old and could not be recovered, the company said.
A statement from eir said: “During an IT upgrade eir webmail data was being moved to a new server, an issue occurred and emails greater than 45 days old were inadvertently deleted and could not be recovered.
“An investigation was immediately launched and eir can confirm approximately 4% of webmail customers have been impacted.
“The investigation is underway and the root cause of the issue has been identified. Measures have been put in place to ensure this issue will not happen again.
Eir apologised to those affected for the loss of their emails, and said they will be given compensation.
Any customer impacted can contact Eir by emailing eirwebmailsupport-gp@eir.ie.
“We will work with them to examine if it is possible to recover lost data that may be held locally on their computers.
“Some customers will be able to recover lost data through their local email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, where emails may be saved locally on their computers.”
In February 2020, Eir told its customers who used the eircom.net email service that they would face a monthly charge to continue using it from the end of March.
The €5.99 monthly charge would be used “be used to invest in the maintenance and improvement of the service going forward,” the spokesperson said at the time.
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They should rename themselves as Fawlty Towers
What kind of company doesn’t keep backups of their own data? That’s unbelievable negligence.
@Rochelle: It’s not their data, it’s their customer’s data. I don’t think they ever made any claims as to its safety.
Use to work for them back in 2002, I see nothing has changed.
This is why you should always keep copies of all your data on your own hardware with proper backups.
@Steve O’Hara-Smith: and hard copies of any photos
@Steve O’Hara-Smith: A lot of people who used the service don’t know how to do that, if an old person which most using it are don’t have anyone to show them then how can they do backups?
@Declan Joseph Deasy: and photos of the hard copies of those photos backed up to the cloud
@Marcus Suridius: This is a problem, and age has little to do with it. I’m in my sixty fourth year, but I’ve been a software developer for over forty years and my data safety habits are older than Microsoft Windows (which I’ve been refusing to trust since it first came out).
I know people a third of my age who have no clue about data safety few even know where their data is kept, or how much there is! But these people “did computers” in school. Trouble is they were taught to navigate menus instead of understanding anything.
@Steve O’Hara-Smith: So all people using this old service have your level of computer knowledge?
@Marcus Suridius: No of course not, few do. I just think that it’s sad that the trend is to ever increasing dependency on online services and “cloud” stored data instead of making it easy and normal for people to manage their own data.
Instead of home data appliances providing our services with automatic snapshots and backups most get Gmail and Alexa.
Such appliances exist, but you won’t find them in high street shops and they aren’t as easy to set up as the “cloud” stuff. Also they mean you need a machine running all the time., few can be bothered. The price is having to trust someone else to keep your data safe from loss, corruption and theft.
I also think it’s sad that school computer education doesn’t start with data security instead of with making Word documents look right.
Can’t believe what I’m reading. Unrecoverable? After 45 days. Not good enough. This is shocking. One of the biggest mess ups ever. In the history of the Internet. Departments should roll for this. Only 4% effected,how can that be. Must be higher. Used to work in communications myself, this is a catastrophe of all proportions. On a brighter note. Happy Christmas all journal readers
The next few weeks are going to be fun for me…
have your say