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!