Dell's XPS Premium Support service database servers were down for four hours on Thursday and two on Friday, according to a Register source, making the company's "24x7" support promise moot.

A Reg reader who called the service to report a dead motherboard on his Dell XPS 720 - which was under warranty - was told that his request couldn't be logged and his part couldn't be shipped because the Bangalore service center's database server was down.

Without server access, the center was unable to log, update, or review support calls - and so what should have been a next-day turnaround was pushed until Monday the 21st.

Our source who declined to be identified tells us that he was informed that the server was down for four hours on Thursday. Dell's Bangalore support office told us that the service had been down for two hours on Friday, but they could not provide any information about a Thursday outage.

As our source asked, "I would think that a company like Dell would be able to provide their own support teams with resilient support solutions from their product range, don’t you?"

Our calls to Dell's media-relations team were not returned at time of writing. ®