Our service outage on Friday.

gaffer · ‎19-03-2012

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.

colhamilton · ‎19-03-2012

If the statement had said - "To make it up to you all, we are having a massive staff party which costs £10,000" would that be ok?

I mean, it doesn't compensate you and it will make the giffgaff staff happier so thumbs up all round!

waheed26 · ‎19-03-2012

We pay for good service and other networks was running well after ten mins with their back up system whereas giffgaff took half day not happy with this at all

grazie · ‎19-03-2012

The suggestion of this charitable donation is admirable, but it compensates me in no way for what has happened. Loss of text and email services is an inconvenience. Complete loss of the ability to make and receive phone calls is very much more than an inconvenience.

I was initially very impressed by way the company admitted their failings. I am not impressed at all by this. It's no more than big fat cat, tax deductible, public relations spin.

ste8582 · ‎19-03-2012

Should maybe realise charity start at home n give us something we had no service all day and made us look like tramps when people phoned it made a tone like we been cut off

da_long · ‎19-03-2012

Excellent news Giffgaff. I have to say that although it was a pain bring without the phone the effort you guys made to keep us updated was excellent. I have been with Giffgaff a month now and I've had more contact from you than I had with my last provider in 14 years and believe me, they left me without coverage for days without the use of my phone. Well done and keep up the good work :-)

larissasasasa · ‎19-03-2012

That money will do charities a lot of good and its really generous of GiffGaff to give that amount- I don't object to them giving money to charity. However the email did say they would make it up to US and really, this doesn't benefit me in any way. The outage was a huge inconvience for me, I went to two phone shops on the way home to try and figure out why my phone would do nothing because obviously I couldn't go on the internet to go on the website... So I'm a tad annoyed its not been made up to me.

pinklady1988 · ‎19-03-2012

Iv been waiting over 24 hours for an agent to reply AGAIN, 10k could get a good few agents for a year based abroad and would benefit giffgaff, customers and telefonica instead of a greedy ceo at a 'charity'

theitexpert · ‎19-03-2012

I personally you should give you customers something back, after all we where the people without phones for nearly a whole day.... PS: Your backup infastructure should not be in the same building... When I used to work in data centres we would have infastructure recrified in various parts of the country IE London Manchester Edinburgh.. If one site fell over then you would simply enable the other... I know even putting the ifastructure at different sides of the building is also an option..

I hope this is a lesson learnt to all businesses and not just GiffGaff...

oldyorkie · ‎19-03-2012

To those that are asking how to vote for the nominated charities ... here's where to vote

Go to the main blog page http://giffgaff.com/blog and look in the top right hand corner of the page.

you will see this... click on vote and the options will be revealed to you..

benzies123 · ‎19-03-2012

Giffgaff,

Whilst morally a charity hand out is very nice, I believe as many others do, that this is a poor attempt to dodge the repurcussions of your error which you have to tried to brush off as a responsibility of a 'third party'. No. We pay for a service, and when you fail to provide that service, you compensate us. Even a tiny sentiment such as some free minutes or something would be a whole lot more appropriate than a charity donation.

In all honesty I am not too bothered about getting compensated, I am more just baffled at the irrelevence of a charity donation.