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Source: ONE News -
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The business and personal lives of 266 New Zealanders have turned upside down with the deletion of all of their emails.
Orcon says it has been trying to retrieve the files, without success.
Chief executive Scott Bartlett said they "had an incident with their email platform" and have been working to fix it. But he confirmed the affected customers have lost the information for good.
Rebecca Macintosh has spent three years getting her Tauranga cafe up and running but much of her hard work was wiped out within seconds.
"All my contacts had gone, all my bookings for the cafe had gone, all my things that for the past three years I had stored there, had disappeared," she said.
Macintosh was using her Orcon account when the fatal glitch struck. She said all her emails just suddenly disappeared and she was left with a blank screen and blank folders.
It was the same for 265 other Orcon customers around New Zealand who became victims of a server error.
"Technology fails. There was an outage on one of our email servers that meant that we lost the mail," Bartlett said.
And he confirmed this afternoon that the mail in question has disappeared forever.
"We tried everything but don't believe these emails can be retrieved.
"It is a really good lesson in this digital age...we all have a huge amount of important information that needs to be backed up both from the ISP and at home."
The company told ONE News it does back up customers emails and it will look at why a back-up wasn't done for the 266 clients.
The customers have been given a $100 credit and Bartlett said they are talking to people who have been more seriously affected to see what we can do to help them out.
But one computer security expert believes the internet service provider will have lost the customers' confidence along with their emails.
"A company that's not careful with email is not going to survive long as an email service provider," computer security expert Clark Thomborson said.
"People do expect their private stuff to stay private, they expect their files to stay accessible, that would be a normal expectation I'd say."
Macintosh is negotiating more compensation from Orcon and says the failure has had a huge impact on her business.
Bartlett said Orcon is conducting a full review of the failure.
Orcon claims to provide faster broadband through its "next generation" network and offers no fixed contracts as an alternative to other internet providers.
Earlier this year, its advert featuring Iggy Pop won the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France.
