Eventually social media management startup HootSuite’s CEO, Ryan Holmes had to come out and apologize to the company’s customers due to the email error that occurred on November 10, accidentally sending over 1000 emails and exposing the names and email addresses of their users to non subscribers or other users. According to an estimate these notifications were sent out to 2200 users overall.
In his email to the affected users, Holmes explained the reason behind this unfortunate incident that took place was due to a technical error. He also wrote that, “I am extremely sorry that this took place and that we were not able to contain the issue sooner. Privacy is a paramount concern for HootSuite and this is in no way a reflection of the respect we have for our users and their information. We’ve requested that recipients delete the messages they received in order to help us contain the issue”.
HootSuite sent the original emails to alert users that their 60 days free HootSuite Pro trial is about to expire. However, due to this error, people who did not even subscribe to the free trial of HootSuite Pro, started receiving several reminder emails. In other cases, many users reported that they had received reminder emails, but they ware addressing someone else, which means that system had sent user A’s email to user B.
This whole mess was caused by HootSuite’s “integration of Seesmic accounts with [its] existing HootSuite user accounts,” but the painful thing was that company failed to fix it even after it had been reported several hours earlier.
Holmes promised affected users that he will “make things right” and to begin with he wants to “make up for this error and inconvenience to you, we would like to extend your free trial of HootSuite Pro for another 12 months”.
This means that now users can access infinite number of social accounts, RSS feeds, influence scores, Facebook insights and give details analytics along with several other top features of HootSuite Pro for one year with paying a single penny.
Source: The Next Web