Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Webkinz.com Site Down For Christmas And New Year’s
One of the current crazes for kids is WEBKINZ.
If you have a child 5-10 or know one, then you’ve probably have already heard of name already. Cute little stuffed animals that come in new different varieties constantly come with a tag and unique code.
With that code, you can log onto www.webkinz.com and “adopt” it within Webkinz World. Kids then can build rooms, decorate them, and place their pet in the virtual home. They can feed the pet, talk to the pet, make it do things and monitor it’s health, happiness, tiredness, etc. You can even make them exercise on treadmills.
One twist is that your child can then go out and earn “KinzCash” by playing different games. The more W Bucks you have the more you can buy for your pet. You can get fancy wall paper, clothes, toys, luxury foods, buy an extension room or two to give your pet more space, etc.
Surely enough, tons of kids got Webkinz pets for Christmas this year. But guess what? Your anxiously excited child will hop onto the internet, type in www.webkinz.com only to be greeted by a CLOSED page. Yes, that’s right, Webkinz World is CLOSED.
The most important time of the year — also when all kids are HOME on vacation, they decide to close the site for the time being. GRRRRR……Is anyone THINKING over at Webkinz World?
Are you thinking the same thing? Take a moment and VENT with the customer service form available directly back to Webkinz World:
http://customerservice.webkinz.com/cs/csg.php
UPDATE: 2 Weeks Later…here’s the generic e-mail I got in response to my customer service query about the outage:
From: support@webkinz.com [mailto:support@webkinz.com]
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 3:03 PM
To: kenny
Subject: ~Webkinz Customer Support – Reply To Your Message
Hello,
Thank you for writing to Ganz.
We are sending you this email in order to provide you with an update on the current situation. Our technical team is hard at work correcting some of the account issues that occurred in Webkinz World. Unfortunately this is a slow process and requires some patience to ensure that issues are resolved correctly. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this problem has caused. Since we became aware of the problem we have already fixed many of the affected accounts in Webkinz World. If you have previously sent an email question and have yet to receive a response, please log into your account and check to see if the problem has already been rectified for your account. If you are still experiencing a problem, we ask for your patience as we will work to answer all emails and resolve all account issues that we receive.
Please refrain from sending multiple e-mails about the same issue as this may result in us reworking your account after the issue may have already been resolved.
We apologize for the inconvenience in accessing your account. Please refer to the “Bulletinz” section of the website under the title “Recent Technical Issues Please read.” in order to see what Ganz is doing to compensate everyone for the technical problems we have faced in the past two weeks.
Thank you,
Webkinz Customer Support
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!
December 28, 2007 - 12:37 pm
Do you know how long it will be down?
December 28, 2007 - 8:41 pm
No, but you should send feedback to the Webkinz company to tell them you’re waiting!
http://customerservice.webkinz.com/cs/csg.php
January 8, 2008 - 12:50 pm
UPDATE: 1 MONTH FREE WEBKINZ.COM ACCONT EXTENSIONS
FROM THE WEBKINZ SITE:
December 31, 2007
Over the past week, technical difficulties have reduced the level of service of Webkinz.com below acceptable levels. We would like to take this opportunity to apologize for these issues and tell you what we will be doing for all of our great members who were inconvenienced over the holidays.Our main problem was a technical issue that impacted the Adoption Centre leaving some of our newest members stuck in the adoption process. If this problem has affected you, please know that we are currently in the process of fixing all stuck accounts. This process is running day and night, and we expect all of the affected accounts to be fixed over the next few days. When your account is fixed you will be able to complete your adoption and begin enjoying everything Webkinz World has to offer. If you have contacted Customer Service about a new account, you will receive an email when your account is ready (note: some of these emails were sent blank . If you received a blank email, check your account, it has been fixed).
Additionally, further technical issues led to interruptions of service for many of our users. We are confident that the fixes we have implemented have dealt with our key problems and that service will now be back at a level where everyone can fully enjoy our great site.
As a token of our appreciation for your patience, we will be awarding an extra 500 KinzCash and a 1 month account extension to all accounts that were affected by these issues. This award will be done automatically at some point in January when we are certain that all affected accounts have been properly fixed and the issues successfully dealt with. You do not need to request the reward in any way.
Thanks again for your patience and we hope you enjoy your stay in Webkinz World.
Happy New Year,
Ganz.
February 4, 2008 - 11:22 am
UPDATE 1 MONTH LATER
I just received this email following-up on the outage and promised credits…seems like they are still having *SOME* problems.
I completely don’t appreciate the cut & paste form letter…and the fact that they didn’t confirm the promised action specific to our account as I originally asked…
From: support@webkinz.com
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2008 11:32 AM
To: kenny
Subject: Webkinz Customer Support – Reply To Your Message
Hi there and thanks for your question.
Over the past week, technical difficulties have reduced the level of service of Webkinz.com below acceptable levels. We would like to take this opportunity to apologize for these issues and tell you what we will be doing for all of our great members who were inconvenienced over the holidays.
Our main problem was a technical issue that impacted the Adoption Centre leaving some of our newest members stuck in the adoption process. If this problem has affected you, please know that we are currently in the process of fixing all stuck accounts. This process is running day and night, and we expect all of the affected accounts to be fixed over the next few days. When your account is fixed you will be able to complete your adoption and begin enjoying everything Webkinz World has to offer. If you have contacted Customer Service about a new account, you will receive an email when your account is ready (note: some of these emails w ere sent blank . If you received a blank email, check your account, it has been fixed).
Additionally, further technical issues led to interruptions of service for many of our users. We are confident that the fixes we have implemented have dealt with our key problems and that service will now be back at a level where everyone can fully enjoy our great site.
As a token of our appreciation for your patience, we will be awarding an extra 500 KinzCash and a 1 month account extension to all accounts that were affected by these issues. This award will be done automatically at some point in January when we are certain that all affected accounts have been properly fixed and the issues successfully dealt with. You do not need to request the reward in any way.
Thanks again for your patience and we hope you enjoy your stay in Webkinz World.
-Webkinz Customer Support
December 17, 2008 - 8:00 pm
We feel they should give us 500 kinzcash per adopted pet. This is only fair. This is preventing my mom from buying anymore webkinz and we cannot even ask santa for any my mom said he is not accepting requests till they fix this #$*#&$(*#&%)_#& problem./
July 28, 2009 - 4:32 pm
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