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.  

[oldyorkie]

That's a fantastic gesture and very very kind.

I'm pleased to see that no compensation was given to members as a result of the outage and am mega-impressed with the generosity of giffgaff

Well done guys...this will go along way to helping a very good cause.

[aix123]

Don't get me wrong - I'm normally all for charitable donations. But I simply can't see how Giffgaff giving 10K to charity serves any purpose whatsoever. The outage was not Giffgaff's fault. The people who lost out were the customers (although I'm not too troubled by the outage, to be honest). So how does giving even 1p to a charity help that? It's like some sort of weird and inappropriate guilt trip. Okay, give some to charity, maybe, but how about the rest going to giffgaffers who stick with you? Compare who was a member last Friday, and if they're still with Giffgaff in say three month's time, then divide the money up between them. Or invest it in the new infrastructure.

[colhamilton]

Saying that we'd rather get a day's goodybag back as refund for loss of service that was paid for is not money grabbing.

Donating money to charity is not "compensation" or making it up to "us" as they are completley unrelated.

Yes, 33p or 11p or 50p - or whatever, is a tiny amount of money and unlikely to be life changing to me, but the principle is what matters.

If Giffgaff came out and said that adding days to goodybags or giving refunds would be too costly or complex and that this is an easier way of saying sorry then that would be ok with me.

BUT

Is the £10,000 donation (+ tax relief) equivalent to the refund that would be due to all customers.  If so, then fine.  If not, where is the rest of it?!?!

[380983]

For this amount of money, it will surelly go for good purposes

[scottishfem]

Its very nice that ur donating money to a good cause but it doesn't make up for the loss of service I an others lost....its not the first time an I doubt it will be the last....we have to put up with problems all the time....painfully slow wap, texts not getting thru for hours, goodybag an topping up problems......this has been going on for months an months so I think u should maybe give us something back for putting up with it all....

[laureng8n]

Em charity? What about us? The people who were actually affected! I think this may make my mind up to leave giff gaff :-(

[wze3369]

@nathanbunn... Shut up,you talk too much. I lost money,cause the network let me down. That's the be all and end all of it.

[elspethp]

I think it's a brilliant idea to give some money to charity, given that you're also spending money on upgrading hardware to prevent reoccurence - but - the email I got, just today, said we would have a choice of charity. 

I think macmillan is an excellent choice (given that I didn't think that much of the other 4 in the 'best 5' listed) but I didn't have a vote!  It was already decided by the time I got the email.  As far as I'm concerned that sucks    You could have just said you were going to give £10K to Macmillan and I'd have thought that was fine but giving me a vote to take part in choosing a charity when it was already decided is just nonsense.

[afcwomblelong]

Charity starts at home. Unfortunately I could not call home when I needed to. Look after your customers first and they will look after you.

[uilleumas]

Quite a lot of people seem to be angry about the compensation going towards a charity rather than us: The Members.

However I think £10,000 would be fairly minimal compared to the thousands of users who are on Giffgaff.

Therefore perhaps it would be better for a single charity to aquire a large donation than countless individuals recieving insignificant amounts.