TalkTalk Business pulls disappearing act on customer emails

It's not DNS. It can't be DNS? Right?

TalkTalk Business customers were forced to survive without email nearly a week after a technical fault disrupted domain hosting.

Problems began on the evening of Wednesday, April 9, when a mystery glitch affected the domain hosting and left some users without email.

According to one customer, TalkTalk "admitted they have made a mistake in changing the settings for a number of domains that they host."

Another user told El Reg: "We had clients' name servers changed and they lost email. We contacted TalkTalk who took 24 hours to respond; they said it [is] not malicious and is a global outage.

"TalkTalk then go on to say that this is a technical fault on their end, and they are aware and working on the issue."

The problem looks to be a classic DNS disaster, where DNS records are edited and no longer point to the right place. A reader told us that name servers had been changed to Cloudflare with no configured DNS records and no ability for users to change those records themselves.

A glance at social media shows that other users are experiencing the same problem, and are similarly frustrated by the lack of responsiveness.

TalkTalk Business works with enterprises and organizations that have specific network needs. The company says its network powers over half a million UK businesses with "rock-solid resilience." It claims: "We go above and beyond to keep you connected. We do what we say we're going to do, when we say we'll do it."

The situation improved over the weekend, but a worrying number of customers still had problems at the beginning of the week as engineers worked through the affected domains.

Despite its size, the telco was unable to provide The Register with a statement explaining what had happened and why some customers found their email connectivity suddenly cut and websites offline.

We understand that things are back up and running now, but we will update this story should the company explain the cause of the outage. ®