Thursday, January 24, 2008
 
Charter Highlights Dangers of Hosted Applications, Web-Based Data Storage
Oops doesn't cover it.
    Charter Communications is offering apologies —and $50 credits — to customers who lost e-mails when 14,000 accounts were cleared out by mistake.

    Charter was doing routine maintenance Monday, clearing out old, unused accounts from the system, when the 14,000 active accounts were accidentally cleared as well, according to Anita Lamont, a spokeswoman for the Town and Country-based company. About 1,000 of those accounts were in Missouri and about 300 were in Illinois, she said.

    The accounts should still be open to customers, but everything in them was deleted — and is gone for good.
Also, Charter tips a bit of its internal process regarding backups for client data. The part it reveals is the text "Why bother?" The font in which they wrote that particular piece of internal documentation remains secret, covered by an NDA no doubt.


- posted by Brian J. @ 12:51 PM
Comments:
What's amazing, according to a Charter spokeswoman quoted by the AP, is that Charter has no way of restoring the accounts from backup. I'm guessing a mid-level Charter exec didn't want to pony up for expensive backup solutions and let the customer "take ownership of the issue." Disclaimer: I once worked for Charter and couldn't stand it. Good people, incompetent management.

In a related incident, too-cool-for-school hosting provider Joyent suffered a 10-day outage in its Strongspace and Bingodisk online storage offerings.

So, how confident do you feel in letting someone else manage your data and communications?
# posted by Blogger gimlet : Saturday, January 26, 2008 11:40:00 AM
 


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