Wednesday, 27 June 2007

Norton Apologises For Wrong Update

Symantec Corporation has apologised to the Chinese users of its Norton Anti-Virus for a wrong update. It has also decided to compensate the users whose computers crashed following the faulty update.

Symantec Corporation has apologised to the Chinese users of its Norton Anti-Virus for a wrong update. It has also decided to compensate the users whose computers crashed following the faulty update.

Symantec said individual users who were affected would have the period of validity for the anti-virus software extended by 12 months, besides giving away data backup and restoration software for free. Affected company users would be permitted to use Ghost Solution Suite.

The move came after the angry users demanded compensation and even began legal proceedings against the company. Symantec apologises to users for "inconveniences" caused by the faulty update and so "sincerely provides a goodwill solution", the statement said.

The updating of Chinese version of the Norton software, which started on May 18, wrongly identified two critical files of the Microsoft XP operating system as malicious codes and deleted them, causing computers to collapse.

Symantec sent a fix for the update 80 minutes later and the issue was resolved four and a half hours later, the company said adding it would draw lessons from the accident and reform its operations to solve such accident faster.

Symantec said about 50,000 users were badly affected, "which is different from media reports", which reported millions of computers in China were affected by the faulty update. Some users said they suffered great losses from computer collapses.