Citizens Telephone Cooperative (Citizens) is a leading-edge technology provider. Daily, the company that employs around 60 people, researches, tests, and deploys upgrades in technology that are unknown to the customer. “We are in the process of integrating multiple systems for efficiency and to provide better support of our customers. While working with two of our vendors and updating data between systems on Tuesday, June 4, 2013, we ran across a glitch which was undetected in our testing or the testing by our vendors. That glitch accidentally sent out commands that reset several hundred DSL modems back to factory default. We were able to promptly find the issue, stop the process, and were able to get most customers back online and working by 7PM that evening. However, we still had a few hundred modems that did not come back online on their own and needed to be reconfigured by our staff” stated Dennis Reece, COO & Assistant General Manager.
After the discovery of the issue and the impact, Citizens employees went into triage mode and began offering extended hours, notifications via various medias, and in-home visits to quickly reconfigure the affected equipment to get the customer back up and working. While this outage did not affect the majority of customers, this was an unusual and embarrassing occurrence for our company.
“We apologize for the outage and for the inconvenience this has caused our customers. We appreciate the understanding and support shown from our members. It is our mission to provide quality service, excellent support, and advanced technology. We do not take this situation lightly and ensure our customers that we are a strong, stable, and reliable company. Each employee of Citizens has shown their commitment to go the extra mile during this recent outage.” stated Greg Sapp, CEO & General Manager.