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.  

[ernestgrimmer]

Unfortunately I have to agree with the other people who have replied.  A donation to charity isn't good enough.  The email that was sent to GiffGaff members stated that you were going to 'make this up to us'.  I don't see how a donation to charity (or tax write off as Adrian Ince pointed out) makes this up to us in any way at all.  We should all have our goodbags extended at the very least.  Everybody experienced varying degrees of inconvenience as a result of the outage.

Also from a personal point of view, I never give money to charities because I don't agree with how must of them are run and how much their execs are paid.  I always give goods (food, clothes etc to shelters, hospices) so from that point of view I'm not supportive of this idea either.

[idrisdragon]

Throwing £10k at a charity won't sweep the whole thing away.

Primary and backup systems at the same location? Fools.

[martybabe]

im not happy abouth this, i'd rather have a days credit added, i paid for 30 days and got 29, no one asked me if charity giving was acceptable, how do we verify it will acually be given anyway. If i'd lost out with any other provider i'd be looking for a part refund!

[garydunham52]

good idea cancer reaserch i would say

[weeman]

I cant beleive (edit - removed) moaning about compensation........Just how much where you people expecting?

£10,£20,£30 ?A goodybag?

Get real,as paddy_o says it only cost people 11p.

If you want a reliable service, leave gg,because this is not the network for you,if your phone is that important.

George

[ilovehannah]

Terrible idea, making a charitable donation on my behalf, no thank you.

Compensation please.

[kennethbaker66796679]

I really think that most members of GiffGaff should really stop being so selfish and asking for personal compensation! £10,000 to a charity is a huge sorry to me. Yes I was frustrated by the outage but honestly it was for a few hours and your all moaning like it was 3 weeks lol And it was actually out of GiffGaff's control - It was a water leak!! They would have never of known this was going to happen lol! I think personally they done a FANTASTIC job of getting the service up and running so fast again! If this was Orange or any other Service Provider we'd be lucky if we were even told about it! Thanks GiffGaff I for one think the network is Fantastic and so does all my family and friends. All those that moan maybe you should troll elsewhere lol you spent nothing so lost nothing!!

[mrbob2]

Haha what a load of rubbish! How would you feel if a motorist crashed into the back of your car, caused £1000 worth of damage and said "how about I give £1000 to charity instead?" and you think yeah iv just suffered but hey give some foreign kids some food for a week. Giffgaff know it's cheaper to give 10k to charity than compensate millions of loyal customers who are pissed off at going a day without ANY service!!! Missing calls, texts, business deals etc, yeah wel all be happy!!!! Not!!

[trivvie]

Well done Giff Gaff.

I support the charitable donation but even better your bringing improvemements forward.. Here's hoping you split your main and backup services so that they are in different locations.

[bachippy]

@ ninja_penguin

As losing a day from your goodybag has been so traumatic I presume you'll be wanting to sue whoever implemented the Gregorian calendar because Feb has less days than the other months thus giving you less days on your goodybag!

Incidently, I'm having trouble understanding why people feel they've suffered financial loss through the network being down.

If you can't make calls then you're not using credit therefore you're not spending anything and haven't lost anything.

If you use goodybags then hopefully you'll have picked one that gives you sufficient every month so you don't run out of texts/mins etc. In that case being unable to use the phone for 8hrs won't have cost you anything because you have bought the goodybag expecting to have some texts/mins left at the end of the month.