Our service outage on Friday.

[gaffer]

As you will be aware we had a full service outage on Friday.  This was due to a major water leak at one of our third party suppliers which knocked out both our primary and backup systems. The outage began at 10.10am and lasted until just after 6pm, when calls, texts and data were working again.

During the outage we worked with our supplier to fix the problem as quickly as possible and made it our priority ensure that all our members were kept up to date with the latest developments.  We are extremely upset to have this happen to our members and are committed to doing our utmost to prevent issues like this from happening again.

I’m pleased to report that things ran smoothly over the weekend and we used the time to fully repair everything and tidy up individual problems caused by the outage. For the more technically minded, Nigel, our CTO , has started a thread in the community which will go into the detail of the outage and what we have done, and will be doing to prevent it’s recurrence.

This year, as we grow as a company, we are committed to making substantial investments in our infrastructure. Due to Friday’s outage we will be reviewing these plans with the intent of bringing forward investment in capacity and resiliency. I’d also like to assure you of our commitment to making the giffgaff experience as good as possible.

It has been amazing to see the messages of support and the suggestions that we should make a charitable donation as a way of making up for Friday’s outage.  We therefore intend to make a £10,000 donation to a charity of your choice.  The charities are ones you nominated for Payback in December  -  to vote just use the polling buttons on the main blog page before the end of the week.  

[donnie]

I said this elsewhere but again since demanding compensation is roughly the opposite of contribution maybe  a 1 or 2 band drop in payback for those doing so is in order. 

It was only an acorn chickin lickin. 

[johnboy3]

Hi

I agree with a donation to a charity, my BBM worked on Friday during the outage so did not get completely cut off.

Also agree with looking at the revision of the infrastructure capital plan to prevent this happening again. Things like the burst water pipe do happen & things do have a nasty way of having a knock-on effect to upset many people. Like a motorway accident closing the motorway for many hours. 

However I guess the first provision in the plan will be to have a backup in a different location! 

Thank you for keeping us informed.

[andrew1974]

it shud go to customers

[pjr]

@ mothership Hopefully, the people moaning about losing a few hours use of a mobile phone and reading your post will feel ashamed and humbled. However, i wont hold my bteath.

[maverick78]

I'm not adverse to giving to charity, in fact it's fine by me, however as much as £10,000 sounds it really is a clever gesture on GG part. Whilst there will be some who will verbalise their ill-feeling towards giving to charity as opposed to compensating it's customers, many or even most will either be happy that gg is making a charitable donation or will keep their mouths shut in fear of sounding greedy and uncharitable..... 

The point I'm making here I guess is that giving £10,000 to charity is a cheap gesture, I don't know how big the gg community is but I dare say that gg has tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of customers, if gg were to give customers compensation of even just £1 to each of it's customers and they had 100,000 customers, that would mean it costs gg £100,000 (ten times what they are going to give to charity and some of that they will be able to claim back as charitable donations are tax deductable so gg aren't even going to have to pay more than £8,000 when all is said and done) - of course £1/customer is so little it's not even worth administering that kind of compensation, so in reality if gg offered compensation it would cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds, maybe somewhere in the half a million to million pound mark if based on a customer population of 100,000 people. 

I'm sorry to point this out to all you gg fans, but if you think about it, gg is using charity as a very smart business ploy to appease it's customers whilst in the mean time saving itself a huge load of cash..... if gg were serious about all this they would offer to give £50-100,000 to charity which would still represent a fraction of what it would cost to compensate us all

[dlahaye88]

Pay us in credit would be nice

[mandolin]

I think Giffgaff handled the problem very well. I think the communication to customers was very clear and regularly updated. I know it didn't really affect me personally but I am sure some heavier users were affected. While the charity idea is very noble I think if compensation is offered it should be in the form of free minutes to ALL users, say 30mins. That's a fair start. So something like this should be included in the poll, list the charities by all means but offer a compensation to members tick box too.

As this system failure was outside Giffgaffs control I have no doubt that compensation will be sought by Giffgaff from the culprit over time. This will pay for the minutes to members compensation. Just a thought eh?

But well done Giffgaff for a good customer relations exercise, Orange or Vodafone would never communicate so well, Ever tried their call centres? Thats why I'm on GG.

[knoppixeu]

Glad is going to a good cause. But hope it does go to cancer research..

[musicrackcompany]

Are you completely out of your mind?

£10, 000 to a charity (at least 50 to 60% of which will probably go to fund the charities infrastructure, possibly more!)?

Personally I find it offensive that you can suggest paying profit made from mine and others custom to other people as a form of compensation for failing to provide what is in effect an essential service to the customers who have paid for it. I am sure the young girl who was totally distraught in my local Car Phone Warehouse,  desperately asking for help because she thought her phone was broken is completely reassured!

Why not spend it on infrastructure improvements or if you have to give it away, then please, please, please do something positive with it and either employ or fund a young unemployed person on a paid internship for a year. 

Just do not insult me by saying, 'Hey, I took your money but didn't give you anything for a day, stressed you out because you missed important texts and calls, put you in a position where you couldn't ring your daughter who desperately needed advise and assistance and I left her thinking that you couldn't be bothered to answer her text call for help, and I don't care that you were in a remote rural area and had no way of contacting her. And now, just to rub salt in to the wound, I'm gonna give some of the money I took from you for nothing in return and give it away!'

Thanks, no really... thanks for nothing!

[lonheart]

Sorry 2 here your car broke down so are you going 2 get compo of the car maker ? Sorry don't think so. This just proves things happen in life ? Sorry at least gg are giving something back ! Good luck 2 which Charity gets the doe