OAKHURST — Sierra Tel is offering up pizza and cookies as part of their customer service plan today, after more than 30 hours of interrupted internet for some customers.
Many residents began to experience technical problems with internet connections on Monday morning, Apr. 10, and the number of people having difficulties grew throughout the day.
“We are currently experiencing an issue that could cause some modems to have connectivity problems,” Sierra Tel wrote on its social media page just after noon yesterday. “Technicians are working to resolve this problem as quickly as possible.”
By late afternoon, technicians were still trying to resolve the issues. Estimates of the number of people affected range from hundreds to thousands.
“We are working through manual and automated processes to restore the correct configuration to the affected modems,” say company officials. “We do not have a time frame for completion, but they are coming back on as we push out the update, say company officials. Your patience is appreciated.”
Today, the parking lots at Sierra Tel and nearby locations are full, and inside there’s standing room only, as customers exchange modems to circumvent the problem. People are waiting patiently, for the most part, and Sierra Tel is offering cookies and pizza in order to make the time pass a little more comfortably for all concerned.
Sierra Tel officials say they are assisting customers just as quickly as they can. We will have updated information later this afternoon.
Pizza & cookies . . . how about a reduction in the monthly bill to reflect the outage/downtime?
I think they need to come clean on several accounts. One, why are they handing out recycled Zyxel p-660hn-51 modems that according to folks posting on Facebook aren’t allowing at least half of them to get back on the internet even after they have supposedly been ‘fixed’. And two, how random of a ‘hacking’ incident was this really? I understand law enforcement is involved but with STI customers wanting to know if their customer data was compromised, I seriously think the company needs to explain exactly what was hacked. Let’s face it, the scuttlebutt is that this is more likely to have been vandalism by a former employee than a ‘random’ hacking event…