Twitter announced<\/a> late yesterday that SMS from T-Mobile users to Twitter’s 40404 short code is working again. In a diplomatic post Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, blamed the 4 day outage on technical problems. This is a turnaround from Friday when Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone reported on Satisfaction<\/a> that:<\/p>\n
The outage was first reported by bloggers including Bibleboy<\/a> and Alternageek<\/a>. Bibleboy contacted T-Mobile and received the following rather consumer unfriendly email<\/a> from an executive Customer Relations Specialist<\/strong> at the carrier’s Office of the President:<\/p>\n
Which certainly implies that the blockage was deliberate. Assuming the email is legitimate that’s terrible way to deal with a customer. It starts out sounding like a canned response given to anyone who complains about any <\/strong>3rd party service. But the part out the ETF is just so negative and uncalled for. I’ve been forced to attend a few day-long training sessions on dealing with customers and always heard that when saying “No” to a customer you are supposed to offer sympathy and alternatives, not threats. The story was picked up by Mashable<\/a> and Satisfaction<\/a>, a five month old forum offering “people-powered customer service” where it quickly gathered a ton of comments.<\/p>\n
This is not the first time carriers have blocked SMS to or from certain services. Verizon recently blocked messages<\/a> from an abortion rights group on the grounds that they were “controversial”. The block was lifted after negative publicity, with Verizon claiming it was all a mistake. T-Mobile, Verizon and Alltel are still blocking users<\/a> from sending texts to the US shortcode of Rebtel, a Swedish company which has a service where you text an international number you wish to call to them and Rebtel calls the number and then calls you back with your party on the line. Rebtel’s rates are a tiny fraction of what the carriers charge for international calls. In both these cases, as with Twitter, these were not unsolicited messages, users had to initiate the dialog.<\/p>\n
Over the weekend there was an incident that points out, oh so clearly, why we need net neutrality on the web and on the mobile networks. It started last Wednesday when T-Mobile USA customers started getting errors when posting to Twitter. Initial indications were that T-Mobile was blocking Twitter traffic. There was an uproar on the blogoshere and on at least one popular forum and now the issue seems resolved. Twitter announced late yesterday that SMS from T-Mobile users to … Continue reading