by Martin Eliasson
2008-01-10 12:34:51
public

Driving traktors on our free time or how Telia lost 1.9 million emails forever

Last year I learned the concept 'declaring email bankrupcy'. This year Swedish largest temephone operator and internet service provider Telia heads the news for having lost 300.000 custommers emails, a total estimated 1.9 million emails just before Christmas. Read below for more...

So far, Telia has told us that the lost emails was because an unfortunate series of events.

See: http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=147&a=730873

  • First the employee that used to handle the email server and monitor the logs left the company on december 14:th.
  • On december 15:th the email server ran into hardware broblems (disc failure presumably) but nobody monitored the logs any more and the server managed to keep on going but it started to queue up mail. Simultaneous, the backup soultion failed which nobody either was monitoring any more.
  • On december 23:th the server finaly gave up. By then there wer no usable backups at all.

Telia now has offered 200 SEK in free purchas for all it's 300.000 custommers.

Given the cost of a swedish network engineer, we may now estimate Return On Investment (ROI) for a decent engineer if we assume the 200SEK purchas offer to cost Telia 50 SEK a custommer to 50SEK x 300.000 / 1.000.000 = 15

Another aspect of all this is my own observation that as technology becomes more complex, the key factor is no longer who owns it but who can operate it. Anyone can rent modern construction equipment cheaply, but few can use it safely around our own properties. Telia may be one of Swedens biggest companies, but they only own the servers. Without renting the operator they are just like you and me driving traktors on our free time.

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