Raru hit by eight-hour outage
Online retailer Raru is back online after an eight-hour outage.
The extended downtime led to speculation that the company has shut down.
However, Raru director Waine Smith assured on Monday morning that it was a hosting problem.
“We’re waiting for feedback having logged the problem,” Smith replied when MyBroadband asked if there were problems at their hosting provider.
Several MyBroadband readers wrote in on Monday to report the downtime, all of them fearing that they lost money waiting for Raru to deliver their orders.
The outage conjures memories of PC Link Computers, another online niche-market retailer whose direct import division began struggling to fulfil orders as supply chains broke down during the Covid-19 pandemic.
After months of complaints, both PC Link Computers’ sites went offline just as the Consumer Goods and Services Ombudsman issued a warning about the company.
One MyBroadband reader reported that Raru was still online yesterday, while another confirmed they last used the site on Friday, 21 October 2022, to track their order.
Another concerned customer posted on Reddit that Raru has been offline for three days.
However, searching through Google Cache reveals that the search engine was able to index webpages on the site as recently as 00:48 today — Monday, 24 October.
Smith said they went down just after 09:00 this morning and are still waiting on their hosting provider to respond.
Like those who wrote in, the Reddit poster was worried they had lost their money.
“Think this probably means my refund is also gone. Been fighting them for months, and now poof,” the poster wrote.
Raru refund complaints
MyBroadband reported last week that Raru had seen a surge of customer complaints pertaining to refunds.
Customers are complaining that they place orders, only for Raru to inform them after it misses its estimated delivery date that it is struggling to secure stock.
Sometimes customers are offered an alternative item, even paying in extra, only to later be informed that Raru’s struggled to secure stock of it too.
Then when customers run out of patience and demand a refund, they are told it will take 30 days to process.
Raru interprets this as 30 working days to give itself even more time to process refunds.
However, several customers wrote to MyBroadband and on Hello Peter that they had not received their refunds within the 30 days promised — even when counting them as working days.
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