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.

sajaadshakoor · ‎19-03-2012

Should give us members five or 10 pound as We were the ones who had to put up with the problem plus I lost most of my credit making calls, -_-

ahmad_afiq · ‎19-03-2012

Finally a corporation who are going to do the right thing.!! Giving back to the comunity is always the right thing to do.!!

dragonsheart007 · ‎19-03-2012

WOW GG giving money away to a charity that was not affected by the outage i missed the birth of my son cos of this am i goin to get that bak no so y should some bloody charity get money for me being and the rest of the gg family get stuffed and fobbed off with this its just they know that it would cost them 10 times that to compensate all of us and its not fair at all we should get something for this.

doug714 · ‎19-03-2012

You have to be quite naive to think that giffgaff are being "generous" or donating a "huge amount of money". To put it into scale, a £10 top up (my assumed average amount someone would top up in a month) from 1000 members is £10,000. Giffgaff clearly have a hell of a lot more than 1000 members, 10k is an extremely small gesture in the hope of quelling complaints. The cost of compensating every member would be in the hundreds of thousands so they are taking the easy way out, and using the "generous charity" excuse as a scapegoat. Nonetheless 10k to a charity is better than compensating £5 or so to each member which wouldn't make much difference, I guess you could say they would be looking after their members not evading doing. Anyway, sorry to be cynical... just thought some of the commenters needed a reality check!

kpfrisby · ‎19-03-2012

i wasnt really put out by the network going down for a short while,people shouldnt rely on mobiles as much as they do and there are plenty of other forms of communicating with people,if there is any money going to charity i think cancer research should get it, a few of my family died from cancer and it is one of the worst killers.

ian_james_pemberton · ‎19-03-2012

Wot about us y don't they give us some mins that would do just show that they care about us we couldt use our phones !!!!

awaisabbas · ‎19-03-2012

Brilliant way to compensate, giving away 10k to charity. Not only are they a brilliant run network they are helpful aswel.

staffielover · ‎19-03-2012

Giffgaff states that to vote for your charity of choice just use the polling buttons on the main blog page before the end of the week. Well, I would if I could locate them. Can anyone point me in the right direction. Thanks a lot.

shushuanghan · ‎19-03-2012

I do respect your generosity and kindness of making a charitable donation.

But you are the company to provide services to us which we have paid prior to your services, and if you can not provide it, you should compensate to your customer first.

If you wanna make a donation to build up your own image in front of us, that will be a great thing to do for the public, but that is your own business!

For sure we can help you to make the decision of where the donation goes to, but keep this in mind, the outage on friday was your fault! and thst is not the first time we can not use your services properly.

The donation to charity and compensation to us are totally different things.

As long as I can only speak for myself, I'd like to say, I'm happy to see your donation but still, I'd like to be compensated.

markkcurtis · ‎19-03-2012

This outage was a considerable inconvenience to me, regardless of how many poeple want to assert that those of us affected should 'chill out'.

However, as I've said before, I'm not looking for compensation - just better communication to begin with without us having to call for it before we get it.

GffGaff is not without its faults and I would rather the £10,000 went to sorting out the constant data connection outages.

Giving it to charity is a limp gesture considering it will probably just be diverted from some other CSR initiative and not actually 'extra' money going to charity. After all it is o2!