This weekend, Boingo officials sent an email to some customers that informed them of a status change on their accounts.  The event took place because of a mistake by someone on the email marketing team.  It really, really wasn’t that big of a deal.

However, CNET posted a story yesterday that alarmed me.  The story, by Steven Musil, made it sound like a bigger issue was occurring over the weekend.  I got emails from folks (because I write about Boingo quite a bit) wondering what the big deal was, some of whom contacted me after reading the News.com article.  Musil profiled a customer who was alarmed at the status change of her account and was unable to do anything about the supposed change.

In a classy move, the Boingo blog featured an apology with full explanation of what occurred.  They did the first thing any company should do when confronted with this type of situation: they apologized and asked for understanding and forgiveness.

However, the criticism continues to flow in the tech press. My advice: there are bigger news stories out there to focus on!

To their defense, Boingo ended their post with this:

We sincerely apologize for this big, fat error. Thank you for your understanding

And that’s the end to that!