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.  

[dreamweb]

How about donating to a site like http://www.criticalunity.org so that the world can know what is really going on, and becoming self sufficient?

- NOBODY would be in the dark or without heating next winter if we all had solar panels and/or free energy devices.

[mgb2]

can I just make the point that, if this 'leak' had happened at 10pm rather than 10am, nobody would have even noticed??? we all average about 8 hours sleep in a 24hr period...

nb, attempt to inject a bit of humour... lots of users need to lighten up a bit

[syorksdeano]

@mgb2

I agree with your comment about if this happened at 10pm instead of 10am, but would it have taken longer to get service fully restored during that time?  Would it have even been noticed if it happened at 10pm?

[smalltalker]

@mgb2, not true, txt's were still arriving late yesterday

[lewi_lewis]

I live and work in a  community of ex homeless (yes, I was once on the streets) in Gloucester called 'Emmaus', I'm a GiffGaffer so can we have some of the cash as well? Our community of 23 ex homeless have a few charity shops that sell donated goods and furniture that earn enough to pay a mortgage and bills on a very big yet dilapidated house and to give us an allowance of £38 a week with no state benefits as a back up. We all work a 40 hour week cooking, cleaning, driving, humping furniture etc plus volunteer for local community projects. Any surplus cash we make is used to fund self help programmes concerning alcohol and drug addiction, bereavement counselling, PTSD counselling (a lot of us are ex forces) plus vocational courses that enable us to rebuild our lives and rejoin mainstream society in the long run. Surely we're a deserving cause?

Pklease bombard Giff Gaff with our worthy request, it will be appreciated,

many thanks,

Lewi :smileyhappy:

[pjr]

Charities have already been chosen.

[warmasice]

Is GiffGiff going to bother replying to it's customers concerns?.. Are they hoping this will just go away???? Atleast have the decency to reply.

[lewi_lewis]

@ PJR - however no one has said that Emmaus can't have any yet, have they? If enough Giff Gaffers ask then it's a done deal - the cheques haven't been written yet. Are we less worthy because we were homeless and bust a gut trying to improve our lives in an economic climate that makes it as tough as the proverbial? Have a heart and join the debate in a more positive and constructive way, please? You have nothing to loose but your negative outlook.

I've already lost faith in Giff Gaff because my 'goody bag' wouldn't activate so i lost a small fortune in call fees and internet browsing, I think £500 for our 'community bus' service and MoT would work wonders, don't you think?

Big smile PJR, you need one :smileyhappy:

[tuithain]

There are lots of comments about compensation due to the outage and lots defending Giffgaff.  Although I don't agree with a compensation culture I wondered if those people defending Giffgaff are aware that it is a wholely owned subsidary of O2.

In other words as one of the biggest networks in Europe it does have a duty of care to provide us with a service and unfortunately for whatever reason they failed to do so.

I would expect a company the size of O2 (Giffgaff) to have the right levels of contingency in place to deal with power outages.

I am disappointed that they failed and annoyed that I am still not able to fully utilise their services 4 days on.

I don't want compensation, I just want a business of this size to do the right thing and invest in the technology and systems so that it works.

[u_ghafoor]

Tuithain, O2's infrastructure is very old and a lot of the masts are based on old technology. It is the only network in the UK that can't do automatic sms delivery reports.