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.
