giff gaff network problems

LouLou

Was that the reason for the outage? Burst water main? Sounds a bit.. :eek:

Another update:

"Update - 17:03

Hi guys,

As mentioned before, data and voice services are being brought online for everyone, but in stages. You will notice that some members are getting it back before others; this is completely normal and to be expected. You should expect to have your data and voice back soon if you have already.

We do not have an ETA for when texting will be back up."

Castaway_in_Scotland

Lucky me, my old phone number was supposed to be ported over to Giff Gaff today. Any idea whether that might still happen, happen Monday or not happen at all? The Community Pages seem to keep dropping out so haven't been able to find anything about this. Can't log in to post a question. Grrrrrr.

LouLou

Yeh, the giffgaff forums are down temporarily. I'd post the reason given but can't at the moment, obviously!

Edit: It's back, here it is:

"Update - 16:37

Hi guys,
Many of you will notice that you are unable to login to post. This is because we have been running on the outages server in order to limit transactions as they currently fail on live.
Due to maintenance performed by lithium all members, including staff, were logged out and since we were on outage servers nobody, again including staff, were unable to log back in. We briefly switched back to live servers in order for staff to log back in, but we should very soon (at time of writing) be back on outage servers again, so this is why you cannot log in."

And:

"Update - 15:30

Just to reiterate what I said earlier; many of you will currently be unable to log into the forum. We are aware of this as unfortunately this is an unavoidable side effect of the measures we have taken to prevent people from performing transactions.

We are aware that many people will continue to view this thread so we will continue to post in it and keep you updated even as the number of posters dwindles."

wellynever

Back up and running on GiffGaff sim as of 6PM.

LouLou

(From the forums): "andee wrote:

Anyone congratulating the GiffGaff team for there response is either high or drunk!

The fact that;
a) single incident at 1 location can COMPLETELY remove your network authentication capabilities is bad. to....
b) then, as an MVNO owned & operated by 02, without any failover or "plan b" scenario is terrible, and to
c) Following that to have only a "best efforts" recovery approach....

Its just Pathetic!"

Hm, he has a point, I was thinking the same.

Another (alecalexandrou) says: "I do not think it very clever of any network to rely soley on one location in order to operate, and I thought that giffgaff had a relationship with 02.
The reason given about a burst water main, leading to a power problem suggests that the water companies and electric companies were all involved in this.
Their workers rely on mobile phones to get to a jobv and be given instructions etc..
Obviously they were not on giffgaff."

Rusty!

At least they're offering some sort of compensation to the users.

Probably won't be anything to write home about, though.

LouLou

The thread is so huge on their forums I skim-read, but I know that they're not liable to cover any losses for business customers. I see it as a blip (assuming it's not going to happen often) that can be justified by the low cost I pay.

Some don't agree with me though..

lochy_2

Everyone who does anything in the serious IT world knows that for what you might call mission critical services then avoiding any single points of failure (SPOF) is one of the 1st golden rules.

And the next rule in the same said professional world of IT is never believe anything your "supplier" tells you. eg. "We have a backup plan/site". Go and test it out yourself.

But in this case GG clearly never did any of that. It's a set of extremely basic errors.

Oh and for the question of where that redundant kit should be housed, well at least 25k from the 1st lot. Ideally on a separate power and comms grid to start with. I could go on....

rwalton159

GG have a problem outside their control, they post constant updates on their website and sent 2 apologies to my wife, daughter and me last night.

This forum is full of stories of bad customer service and poor customer care. I think GG did all they could and communicated better than any other Company I have come across.

Why should they pay compensation when the fault did not lay with them.

I really do despair with some of the comments on this thread. If you don't like their product then leave them and go to one of the more respected networks but pray tell me which one is better.

sillygoose

And how long was Blackberry down a while ago. No one can say they are small, most the leading businesses in the country and many others depend on them, and pay handsomely for it.

So much for redundancy. Now thats something I happen to know about having put in redundant power systems for many major companies. But there comes a physical point where even redundant systems have to switch over and if a basement switch room becomes flooded by a burst water main not much can be done, if its not all killed, people will be.