We Made A Mistake

One of the things you learn in business is that things will always go wrong when you least expect it.
You can invest as much time and energy as you like in trying to avoid mistakes, but they will still happen.
We had one of those issues this morning with our billing system!
While it might be easier to shove my head in the sand or try to blame someone else when these kind of things happen, I personally couldn’t.
I’ve tried to email as many of our clients as possible who may have been affected by the problem, but it still does not detract from how much inconvenience this may have caused some people.
And now to explain it all …..
A number of our clients were affected by a programming mishap yesterday when our developers synced the IE domain renewal dates with the IEDR.
We are terribly sorry if you were affected by this and as managing director of the company I feel it is my responsibility to contact anyone who may have been affected to offer my apologies and an explanation.
Over the past few months our development team have been working on improving our billing system.
One area that was causing issues were the renewal dates of some IE domains, in particular those that had been transferred from another provider to ourselves.
While fixing this issue our developers managed to break part of the internal logic, which led to invoices being reissued for domains that had already been renewed.
As soon as we realised what had happened we took steps to reverse the issue and will be removing any invoices that were created in error.
I am terribly sorry if this caused you any inconvenience and if I can be of any assistance to you please let me know.
If you have any invoices on your account relating to IE domains with an issue date of July 4th 2007 then they are possibly affected.
Any invoices with dates prior to this should be correct.
We hope to have rectified the issue within the next 24 hours, but if you have any doubts please do let us know.
If you need to contact our accounts team please use accounts@blacknight.ie or contact me directly (michele@blacknight.ie) and I will personally look into the matter for you.
Sorry about this !

About the Author: Michele Neylon

Known for his outspoken opinions on technology and the Internet, Michele Neylon is the award winning author of several blogs and co-host of the Technology.ie podcast. A thought leader in the Internet community, Neylon is active within ICANN and an expert on policy, security, domains, ICANN, Nominet and Internet Governance. You can stalk him on various social media networks including Twitter and Instagram

2 Comments

Cormac July 5, 2007 at 12:41

It’s always nice to see some clairty when things go sideways.
Some other hosts could learn something here about communicating to their client base.
Thanks for the quick response Michele.
Michele Neylon July 5, 2007 at 14:14

Cormac
As I’ve been saying to people – if we screw up we need to accept responsibility for it.
Michele