Today's Service Outage

[#1]

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.

[#2]

[#3]

Not a big deal but if text messages were sent during the outage are we still going to receive them or will never know if there were any? Gintare

[#4]

Personally why all the negative stuff directed at GiffGaff is beyond me, like they could stop what happened.

All this compensation talk is loblox . This sort of things happen and we are all good and up and running again.

People get a great service from GiffGaff and cheap calls texts net services and they spit their dummies out when theres a technicle issue.

'

Well to those who complained and moaned and threatened to go to a different network, 'JUST * OFF' and do it, we don't need you cry babies.

[#5]

Hi,Mike

Many thanks for getting back to somthing like normal,

no-one like the loss of service,however it happens ,

as you pointed out fix then address so that we all learn somthing ,

in life when things go pear shaped and you cannot fix it.

That s a problem,

kind regards Norman [ 5 gifffaffers here ]

[#6]

Thanks for doing your best to fix the problem, accidents do happen :-)

[#7]

Good to see this post, unlike all the "give me some compensation" posts .

At the end of the day, water mains burst all the time and cause all sorts of problems. My water was off over Christmas 2 years ago due to a burst water main. These events are out of anyone's control or prediction, so on this occasion I'm not convinced there is a case to answer for giffgaff to offer compensation.

[#8]

Many thanks to the Giffgaff team for the constant updates today. :-)

[#9]

The only compensation I need is my texts and data working, which they are now, so forget about giving me compensation, keep up the great work!

[#10]

Cant believe the way some people go on about the problems today, yeah it done my head in, but its one of those things, my internet runs slow sometimes but im not on the phone to sky demanding compo. Ive also seen comments saying they might sue giffgaff? Haha, how? That will be like me going to the bookies with my losing bet slip saying "you stole my money, I want it back" we all know what the answer would be.....F.O !! So stop your moaning and give GG a chance, **bleep** happens !! Great network, will still recommend you

[#11]

appreciated the updates all day, i did loose money from people not being able to get in contact with me for work.But, its all cool, **bleep** happens, I think its a fairly sad state in todays society when people loose signal for a few hours and get so upet and irrate about it, unnescessary, over a few lost poorly written lines of text.