Vermonters with Sovernet or FirstLight email service say they were unable to send or receive emails for more than 48 hours following an unspecified service outage.
The issue started on Sunday around 1 p.m. and lasted until service was restored around 5 p.m. Tuesday, according to Sovernet customers who contacted VTDigger. Customers were unable to access their accounts during that time.
Several customers reported they still have not received emails sent during the time when their emails were inaccessible. The company blamed a service outage but did not give details.
“Our third-party hosting service provider is currently experiencing a service outage. As a result, all email services have been impacted. We are currently working with this provider to resolve the situation,” Maura Mahoney, FirstLight’s chief marketing officer, said initially in a brief email Tuesday afternoon.
Then at 5:02 p.m. she wrote: “Customers have confirmed that they can now send and receive emails.”
Some of nearly a dozen Vermonters who contacted VTDigger and others who aired their grievances on social media complained about poor customer service and the lack of response from FirstLight, a fiber-optic provider with headquarters in Albany, New York, and offices in Poultney.
FirstLight did not respond to specific questions, including how many customers were impacted by the outage, or to requests for a phone interview on Tuesday.
One customer, Lisa Verschoor of North Bennington, said midday on Tuesday that she had been unable to access her email since Sunday, halting her business. She pays FirstLight a monthly fee to use its email server for her travel agency, Avalon Travel. Verschoor said she’s been using Sovernet — which later morphed into FirstLight — since “email became a thing,” and had never experienced an issue like this one.
“With Sovernet, if they ever had problems before FirstLight, at least you could reach someone and they’d say, yeah, we’re down, or it’s going to take a day to get back up,” Verschoor said.
When she tried calling FirstLight’s customer service, Verschoor said, she was left on hold until she was caller No. 2, at which point the call disconnected.
Sovernet Communications, a fiber optics network from Bellows Falls, was acquired by Oak Hill capital partners and combined with FirstLight Fiber in May 2017.
Kathleen Monroe of Barnet said she also tried calling customer service after she noticed the problem.
“About 35 minutes into my wait time, they came out with a statement that they played for those of us on hold saying that they were now aware of a problem,” Monroe said. “I think it was users who alerted them to the fact that they had one.”
Monroe said she continually checked the “network status” tab on the company’s website and saw the explanation advance from “investigating,” to “monitoring,” to “pending partner action,” where it stood as of late Tuesday afternoon.
“You anticipate that it’s going to be taken care of in an expedient manner and you don’t expect it to linger for days,” Monroe said.
Monroe and Verschoor were able to send and receive emails again late on Tuesday, and said things seem back to normal, except neither of them received any of the emails they know they have missed since Saturday.
Rick Winston of Plainfield has been using Sovernet servers for about 25 years and said he had never had such a prolonged issue, leading him to wonder if the company is facing malware or ransomware problems.
“When I’ve had a problem, it’s only lasted a few hours,” Winston said. “This is the first time it’s lasted over half a day.”
Asked about the FirstLight issue, Christine Hallquist, executive director of Vermont Community Broadband Board, said, “Vermonters need choices.”
“I think this shows the reason that the Vermont Community Broadband Board and the communication union districts were formed by the Legislature,” Hallquist said in an email. “The communication union districts are community-driven organizations who are striving to own the infrastructure so that they can provide options when providers are not meeting customer expectations.”
FirstLight has more than 24,000 miles of high-capacity fiber-optic cable throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, according to the company’s website. Downdetector, a site that tracks outages live, mapped several user-submitted problems Tuesday with FirstLight’s service in the past 24 hours.
