Angry customers are counting the financial cost of an outage at web services provider Webcity that has lasted more than 24 hours, with no estimate of resumption time of services being offered by the company.
Online store operator Mike Watson of Classic Boat Supplies has been unable to use his website and email service during the outage, costing him in the thousands, he told Fairfax.
"The main issue is that there was no communication for a large number of hours. We have no idea whether the fix is two hours or two days away."
"We're definitely moving [service providers]. We just can't afford this for an online business."
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Hundreds of other frustrated clients aired their anger via Twitter.
@WebcitySupport The negative impact on my business is now financially measurable. How much longer?
— Alasdair Hirst (@Hirstydownunder) March 23, 2017
@WebcitySupport Will it be fixed this morning? We have a business to run without emails and website there is no business!!!
— The French Brasserie (@frenchbrasserie) March 23, 2017
@WebcitySupport pic.twitter.com/r7gaE4uqH0
— John Contoleon (@YianniCon) March 23, 2017
Webcity meltdown!
— connie@law.com.au (@connie42558084) March 23, 2017
The first acknowledgement of the outage came from Webcity at 10.49am on Thursday.
"Sorry for the disruption. We're working to resolve ASAP," said the company on Twitter in reply to a customer experiencing disruption to their web services.
@WebcitySupport our you having any problems? Our emails and web site are not working. https://t.co/AvWADtP1Yi
— Janette Goodall (@JanetteJGoodall) March 22, 2017
Despite the outage, Webcity's own website remained online, suggesting it is hosted via an alternate or mirroring service.
A former employee spoke to Fairfax about the many redundancies of technical staff over the past two years contributing to a situation where Webcity has "little or to no expertise on hand to deal with the issues they are facing".
An IT specialist likened the outage to an event in 2011 when Australian domain registrar and web host Distribute.IT was compromised, affecting tens of thousands of businesses.
"Distribute.IT had the same symptoms for a week, until everything came out that is was hacked," said David Dunn, infrastructure manager at Network Dynamics.
"They're claiming it is hardware failure but professionals could solve such a problem within hours.
"Potentially, businesses' entire data could be lost. Websites might have to be rebuilt. But it's a bit of a question mark.
"Providers such as us are already getting calls from [Webcity] customers, asking how they can move services."
Webcity services over 160,000 customers in the region, according to its website.
Webcity was approached for comment.