Saturday, December 15, 2007

T-Mobile and Twitter, Friends Again?

Update 07:41pm EST: I can confirm that I can now send some SMS messages to Twitter. Whether political or technical, the issue is going in the right direction. I still really am hoping for a statement from T-Mobile regarding what happened and, if the issue wasn't political, why the president's office was indicating (in harsh emails) that it was blocking Twitter.

Update: AlternaGeek reports "All is Well"

Update 12/17/07 08:15am EST: It certainly seems that everything is now ok. With Monday morning arriving there are no more (visible) complaints of anyone still having issues. It will be interesting to see how T-Mobile handles the PR nightmare they created for themselves. Here a few links of sites reporting the incident after resolution:
WAP Review
Mashable




Well folks, it looks like Twitter and T-Mobile may be friends again. A statement from a Twitter rep indicates the issue is technical and not political.

Personally, I am not sure that I totally believe that this was never a political issue. While I understand that it's a common occurence for CSRs to give incorrect information to customers, this is of a different magnitude. Many people have e-mails from T-Mobile's President's office that not only state they are intentionally blocking Twitter but followed up with threats of the $200 early termination fee. These emails are on top of many people who were specifically told this by numerous different T-Mobile CSRs.

The important thing that matters is that the situation be rectified but the issue that will still remain is why T-Mobile responded in the ways that they did to their customers. It has a funny taste in my mouth -- the taste that someone felt the pressure and reversed a previous decission but didn't want to admit that they made a mistake.

The problem isn't solved at this time so it does remain to be seen but solved or not, T-Mobile certainly needs to send an apology to their customers for the ill-worded E-Mails that were sent out from the president's office.

3 comments:

Igor The Troll said...

The owe you an apology, what the T-Moblie Rep said to you is ilegal.
http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html

Jimmy said...

unfortunately...I still get the error message "Service is temporarily down. Please, try again later." hmmm...

Bob K Mertz said...

Thunderclaw: yea.... it was working for a while and then it stopped. If it is, in fact, a technical issue, I'm sure its just because they are still working on it. If it's not a technical issue, well, I guess there will be more to come :)