Major IT outage at magazine distributor Network Services impacts newsagents

Magazine distributor Network Services has suffered a major IT outage impacting primary and secondary systems. This has stopped newsagents being able to lodge returns. It has also stopped network sending out electronic invoices for magazines for tomorrow – the busiest day of the week.

Network advises that they hope to have files ready at some stage tomorrow however this will be too late for your morning processing.

My newsagency software company Tower Systems advised all its customers earlier today. That advice included:

It is our recommendation that you manually arrive titles so you can get magazines labelled and on the shelf so they can be sold.

The following knowledge base article has advice for those needing a refresher on arriving manually: arriving magazines manually.

Network are in the process of sending their own email explaining the situation.

If you have any questions please contact the help desk.

Other software companies are welcome to publish their advice here.

The implications for newsagents of the outage are considerable with the processing of returns cutoff passed and no visibility to Network of the quantum of many returns processed – leaving the company challenges as to how to finalise newsagent indebtedness.

Here is information I received from network about this earlier today:

As you have no doubt noticed or heard, we are experiencing some system issues here at Network which has affected Netonline.

Our IT department are working on the issues, but we do not yet have a solid timeframe as to when NETonline will be up and running.

We are aware that the biggest concern for customers will be their crediting of their returns, as the final cut for the monthly statement is today.

If they are using XIT, at the moment their returns are queuing up and they will not be receiving our confirmation emails. XchangeIT have advised that they will be able to pull those forms trough from POS systems when our system is up and running.

If customers use Netonline to do their returns, their position is a little trickier.

In light of this, we will be working with our accounts department to ensure that any stores who attempted to complete their returns today and were unable to are able to have their credits moved forward.

We encourage those customers who are concerned to contact us so that we can register their account for credit checking when the end of month statement is generated. Customers are then encouraged to process their return as soon as possible when our system is back up.

I will be advising customers when our system is back online.

Any questions of concerns, please let me know.