Today's Service Outage

[gaffer]

As you very likely to be already aware, today we've suffered a major service outage - it was caused by major water damage to the computer network in a our data centre and it took nearly 8 hours fix.

Firstly I'd like to offer my apologies for the interruption in service and thank all of our members for their patience whilst we fixed the issue.

The service is largely back up and running now - the exception is new activations which are currently being queued and our service teams are working on a fix.

Some of you have asked about compensation - we're going to focus on fixing the issues we've had and make sure we have a stable service first - and then we'll sit down think of ways to make it up to you.

We'll continue to post updates on the support community so click here for the latest news.

Thanks once again for your patience.

Mike Fairman

CEO giffgaff

Update 21:15

Thanks for everyone's comments - especially those appreciating our way of keeping you up to date!

In response to a few of the issues raised...

Porting - those that were scheduled for today may have been delayed - we're continuing to work on these as fast as we can. 

Texts - we think that for most of the outage, inbound text messages should have been delivered. Whether those that failed initially will ultimately be delivered will be determined largely by the re-try policies of the network from which they were sent. In other words, you may or may not get them depending on which network sent them.

Root cause - we will of course investigate this and report on the conclusions. Our data centre does have an uninterruptable power supply and backup generators but its possible that even if these worked the water damage to the network gear was sufficient to bring the service down.

[lesleylyttle]

many thanx for keepin us all updated ...doing a great job guys

[treespot]

Why is everyone complaining,a burst water pipe cannot be predicted or the time it takes to repair the damage. If you run a business or anything else you should have a backup network in place or someone else's phone you could borrow. I was off line yesterday and was trying to phone my doctor in the morning and my husband in the evening,but I realise that you cant stop a pipe bursting and no I don't run a business just have some intelligence.

[gbt1]

Sorry guys but this isn't good enough.  PAC code requested.

People rely on their phones whether this is a clever thing to do or not.

It aint rocket science to have environmental monitors in a server room / data centre.

I recently gave giffgaff a second chance as I like the business model but operationally you fail.

[fiendishlyclever]

All networks seem to have these issues,it is just annoying (or worse) when they affect you personally. First I knew of it was when several outgoing calls failed (I assumed the lack of data was a mast glitch, happens a lot on three when a mast is at capacity). Let's see what the post mortem uncovers...

[poley]

Here we go again gime gime gime could not use my phone so I want some compo GET REAL people stuff happens.

I was due to port a number in yesterday but I think they had more important things to sort out so it not a prob for me to wait just a bit of a ball ache not having a fone yesterday but even if I had cos of the outage I would not able to use it.

On the plus side had a very quite day nobody txting or calling me so it did have its upside lol

Steve

[delmonti1]

there is no point entering anything in here as we all know all to well its just going to be ignored ive lost £10 thanks to this and ok its not a large amount of cash its the principle that has angered me more then anything.  personaly i wanna know who burst the watermain so ican slap them upside the head 

[andy0]

There seem to be a lot of self-declared experts on system redundancy, asking why giffgaff doesn't understand redundancy.

After plenty of them have asked the question over and over again, when it's already been clearly and patiently answered over and over again, perhaps we are all starting to understand redundancy.

[cherrycoke1983]

I don't want any money maybe just a free day of internet 

[shirleyrose9]

Any one who believes a word of that excuse is a fool japan still had mobile connection after tidal wave

[piratehooker82]

People need to get a grip it was only 8 hours with no mobile, not the end of all life as we know it.  You could still use wifi so imessage, whatsapp and skype etc as they all worked fine over the net and if  the people complaining really needed to speak to someone that importantly they would have found a way to do it.

They worked hard and got it fixed and kept everyone updated throughout the day, I'm very happy with giffgaff and the way they handled the problem. 

People dont need compensation for a few hours of lost service they just need to get a life.