No Email Over Easter For Tiscali Broadband Customers

To add to its current woes, its been reported today that many Tiscali Broadband customers had no access to email over the Easter bank holiday weekend.

The incident is thought to have been caused by the company’s failure to renew the screaming.net domain, a domain Tiscali acquired as part of its merger with World Online back in 2000.
A technical agent of Network Solutions (the company Tiscali used to purchase/renew the domain name through) told ISPreview, “Multiple expiration notices were sent to Tiscali by Network Solutions prior to, and after the domain name registration expired. When we did not receive Tiscali’s renewal fee by the expiration date, their domain name registration services were deactivated.”
Continuing the agent said, “However, rather than delete the domain name at that point, we sent additional renewal notices and provided a grace period of more than 30 days. Because we did not receive Tiscali’s renewal fees by the end of the grace period, the domain name services were terminated in accordance with our Service Agreement and the domain name was registered by another registrant.”
Tiscali have been surprisingly quiet over the incident, despite angry customers bombarding their technical support forum. However, they did give the following statement, “We are aware that there has been an issue with users accessing the screaming.net email. We have identified this as an issue with our domain name partner and are pursuing this as a matter of urgency today.”
It certainly comes as another blow for the struggling company as it searches for a buyer.