Red Energy's online system has been displaying the message "Systems not available Our systems are currently down for maintenance. Please try again later." for more than a week.
Questions for IT people:
What sort of things could go wrong that would lead to the system going down for more than a week?
What sort of compensation clauses are there in cases like this (between IT company and Red Energy)?
Edit: Clarified question 2.
Not compensation for me. Compensation from the IT provider to Red Energy.
My mistake.
Database failure and rebuild.
Edited after OP clarified:
As for compensation normally it wouldn't be all that much, shit happens and you might find the fault came from someone on Reds payroll not the IT company. Most of the time when compensation is offered its just a refund of the contracting fees for that time (eg: X per month/30*length of outage=amount refunded). You have to remember that Red is also at the mercy of the IT contractor, without them they don't get the issue fixed and you can't just instantly move to a new IT provider overnight. Of course a few months/years down the line when the contract is up for renewal an outage won't be looked upon favorably and they'd either choose a new provider or demand assurances it wont happen again.
You name it, it could have happened.
What is the impact of the outage on you, financially? If you can't pay a bill or similar, I'm sure if you ask Red Energy they will give you a time extension to pay. Beyond that, you would have to show them how it's affecting you financially and that would be assessed on a case by case basis.
If you need to pay a bill urgently and it's causing you anxiety, I'm sure there's a phone number on the bill that you can ring for payments else try their number direct: 13 18 06. It's a public holiday in Melbourne on Tuesday FYI so best to try ringing them today.
You can still pay the bills online by clicking through the email. The payment portal is hosted by Westpac and it's running as usual.
Having said that, please do verify that the email you're clicking through is the legitimate one and the portal passes all the usual security checks before putting in your card details.
Have you tried other browsers? I know some companies don't like certain ones but for some reason show a "its down" message, happens all the time with Firefox Alpha. Harvey Norman used to do it to me all the time.
This happens very often. Try clearing cache and cookies too.
What sort of things could go wrong that would lead to the system going down for more than a week?
Anything from hardware failure, data curruption, upgrade that went wrong. Who knows
What sort of compensation clauses are there in cases like this (between IT company and Red Energy)?
Depends on the contract, and that also depends on if it is a IT company that did it. Might have been RE own internal staff.
It’s definitely worth clearing your cache as some browsers will be going back to it’s saved state.
As for the issue it could be a failed database server or pretty much anything. For compensation it would depend on the SLA in place and who is hosting the server. If the IT dept is just providing support and say it was hosted via aws then they’d have to chase AWS. Mind you if AWS went down we’d all be in the shit.
Their design must be really shit if there is no redundancy and backup. If it's outsourced then they should also check their SLA and maybe upgrade to a contract with redundancy and not allow a week. Don't get me started about complete incompetent IT staff which also can cause a lot of delays…
Bit off topic i signed up for Lumo gas and they sent out an email to register for my account about week ago. Their system has been down ever since.
Lumo owned by the same mob.
Ahhh…. that explains it
So it's not just me!
Question for the OP (or anyone with Red Energy) do they show you the daily consumption and (solar) generation? Just moved from Simply Energy to RED, but haven't been able to log in because I only got connected this week.
I'm still waiting to get my first bill hence I want to log in and check.
What sort of things could go wrong that would lead to the system going down for more than a week
Russians.
503 SERVICE UNAVAILABLE
1) Doing some digging, their portal changed servers 28/10/18 (5 days ago) to myaccount2.lumoenergy.com.au. I'd guess that they're migrating all your data to a centralised Lumo Energy database / portal and share hosting costs rather than have seperate servers for all their entities.
2) There is no compensation if it's their choice to move and have their portal down.
Additionally, their sysadmins need to fix up a simple task: http://redenergy.com.au/ 404's - points to their old server (Azure) instead of https://www.redenergy.com.au (CloudFlare) ;)
You can contact them to find out what's happening / ETA, but once their migration is complete and working correctly, it'll be up.
Well well… someone at Red Energy must read the forums. The online login is back up!
Thanks to everyone for your replies.
Lol. Get over yourself.