Following up after the outage on 23rd November

[#1]

As most of you know, we had an outage on the network yesterday from approximately 4.30pm until 8.00pm. This meant that during that time giffgaff members were unable to make texts or calls. Mobile internet was unaffected and members could receive texts, but not receive calls. The outage affected our entire network, and was the most serious outage we have had since launch. Members will have also experienced intermittent faults when trying to access our website, as a side effect of the outage on our backend systems.

Full service was restored to the vast majority of our members around 8.00pm last night, though it seems a very small minority may still have issues this morning and we will be working through those on a case by case basis. If you are experiencing any difficulty making calls or texts please contact one of our agents here.

We apologise for the inconvenience this loss of service undoubtedly caused. We take this extremely seriously and I want to share with you what our plans are in response:

1) Our Chief Technical Officer is with the key supplier associated with the outage this morning and will be conducting an end to end investigation with them about what happened, when, and why. Once he has all the facts, he will update the community with a forum post on the outage, including plans to prevent future occurrences. This will take a few days.

2) The giffgaff management team will review the outage from a number of perspectives including our infrastructure arrangements, back up plans, and how we communicated with members. This review will include all the many suggestions made during and after the outage by our members. The aim will be to make sure we learn as many lessons as possible. I will update the community with a post  on the results of this review some time next week.

3) Compensation. Although we are not obliged to give compensation for an outage of this type and duration, we recognise that it was the most serious fault we have had to date. We also acknowledge the many posts made by members regarding compensation, both pro and anti, and I'd like to thank you for the range and maturity of those suggestions. In light of these considerations, we have decided not to award a generic compensation to all members. Instead we will make a donation of £10,000 to whichever charity the community chooses in the poll which is already live here (login, scroll down, poll is on the right, click the link to see voting options).

Lastly, I would like to thank all the members who gave us their support during the outage, either by redirecting members to the central updates, keeping things calm or simply acknowledging our efforts to fix the problem. It is all very much appreciated.

Thanks