EE who are one of the UK’s largest telecoms companies providing Mobile, Data and Internet services to millions of customers forgot to renew one of their domain names – FSNet.co.uk cutting off thousands of customers to their email accounts.
I don’t know how EE can forget to do something so simple, a .co.uk renewal is only £5- 10 per annum and can be registered for many years in advance. EE, formerly know as Everything Everywhere, is a British mobile network operator and internet service provider. The company was formed in 2010 as a 50:50 joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Orange S.A. (formerly France Télécom) through the merger of their respective T-Mobile and Orange businesses in the UK. It is the largest mobile network operator in the UK, with around 28 million customers, and the largest operator of 4G services in Europe.
They also own the domain name EE.co.uk which they use as their main homepage, BT Group announced in February 2015 that it had agreed to acquire EE for £12.5 billion, subject to regulatory approval expected by March 2016 maybe with everything going on they just forgot to renew the domain name but imo it’s really not acceptable for a company with £6 Billion in revenue to forget about the simple things and affect thousands of customers.
Here is the full story below.
Thousands of UK internet users were cut off from email after their ISP failed to renew the domain name used to route them.
The address “FSNet.co.uk” is the legacy domain used by Freeserve, which later merged with Orange. The domain was first registered and used back in 1999 but it expired on 4 August, leading to its suspension a month later.
The first customers knew about it was when their email simply stopped working. They flooded EE Broadband’s customer board with complaints, quickly pinpointing the problem and demanding that the company renew the domain – something that typically costs just £6 ($10), although it can cost around £100 ($155) for a suspended domain.
Absolutely furious having spent all morning trying to sort out connections before finding this post. EE PLEASE GET THIS SORTED.The company duly renewed the domain and email access was restored roughly 24 hours later.
EE would have received no less than three emails from UK registry operator Nominet warning it that it was due to expire, was due to be suspended, and had been suspended. This raises the question of whether EE even updated the domain’s administrator emails to make sure it would see them.
The company has also only renewed the domain for a year, suggesting either that the company can’t afford to splash out the extra £60 it would cost to register it for 10 years, or that the thousands of customers still using Freeserve’s email address simply slipped through the net and the company will now attempt to move them over to its normal systems.
“We’re very sorry for any inconvenience caused by the technical issues on FSNet,” said a company representative. “We can confirm that these have now been fully resolved.”
$8.88 – Dot COM Domain Name Registrations
