Egg CIO fails to crack site fault

Egg has so far failed to identify the cause of the technical problems which have prevented customers accessing their accounts over the last two days - and nor does it know when normal service will be resumed.

Egg's site has been dogged with downtime over the last two days following a server upgrade, as revealed exclusively by silicon.com earlier today. Dana Cuffe, the company's CIO, said he does not know when the site will be back to normal. He said: "We are getting closer to finding out what is wrong. My team of experts are working to get the site up as soon as possible." Cuffe said the old and new sites were running in parallel for three weeks from 15 December until the upgraded version went solo on 5 January. However, Nick Jones, senior analyst at Jupiter MMXi, argues that this is not thorough enough, saying that during upgrading, sites should run in tandem for at least two months. In the meantime, Egg's customers have been left in the lurch, with no explanation on the site as to why they cannot access their accounts. Colin Jack, an Egg credit card customer, first reported the problems to silicon.com. He said: "I wasted a couple of hours on Monday night trying to access my account. It then took me a considerable amount of time to get an explanation from call centre staff. It annoys me that there is not a notice to customers on the home page to let them know what's going on." Jones was critical of the way customers are handled in these situations: He said: "The technology people should work with the marketing people to produce an understandable explanation for customers. This should then be fed through to the call centre where operators can give non-technical explanations to customers' queries." Jones explained that Ebay, which itself suffered serious downtime, handled the situation very well from this point of view. The auction site created a message board for users that was updated every 25 minutes, he said. Jones added that Egg will have to work hard this year to succeed in a fiercely competitive marketplace and that lengthy downtime is not going to help.