MCI WorldCom begs forgiveness: Damage control goes into full swing

After a frame relay outage that lasted more than a week, MCI WorldCom is seeking absolution. The carrier finally restored the frame relay network on Aug. 15 by bringing it down over the previous weekend to remove the offending upgraded software.

As an attempt to cool customers' heated tempers, the carrier resorted to financial peace offerings.

"We plan to offer all of our clients a credit of two days for each day the platform was affected," said Bernard J. Ebbers, president and CEO of MCI WorldCom. Ebbers added that he and many other MCI WorldCom employees had been delivering letters of apology to the frame relay customers involved with the outage. The carrier blamed the glitch on a Lucent Technologies' software upgrade of switches. But MCI WorldCom still bears the burden of explaining the outage to customers.

"AT&T reacted far better [with its frame relay network outage last year] by telling customers, `Here is what is going on, and this is how we are going to solve it,'" said Melanie Posey, an analyst with IDC. By keeping customers apprised of the situation, a carrier can keep discontent to a minimum, she added.

"We ended up not using our contingency plan because we were assured the network would be restored. Those assurances were hollow," said a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board of Trade, which lost several days of trading due to the outage. "We should have disregarded what they were telling us."

The carrier still is not sure why the software failed, Ebbers said. "It's frustrating when you want to get an answer and can't get it. Every day you want to tell customers the root problem. The fact is we didn't have these answers, and we are still investigating some of the software issues that impacted this network platform," he said.

"It was kind of like saying, `the check is in the mail,' and that doesn't work," said Curtis Price, program director for Stratecast Partners.