Giffgaff shudders to a halt Customers of the "people's network", Giffgaff, found themselves disconnected from the people when the entire network went down for three hours. The network's billing system started throwing up errors just before five on Tuesday, and the entire network - closely followed by the company's website - was down for the next three …
This is refreshing from a provider that they'll dangle their brass monkeys in the wind when something goes wrong. My ADSL provider does something similar and its nice to be able to see a message saying "we're onto this mufu", even if it takes a while to sort.
Much better than other providers who try (and fail) jedi 'we are not the cause of the fault you are looking for' mind tricks.
It's a bit odd to whinge about the lack of information due to wrongly alleged non-availablity of the forum.
My observation would be that there was a surfeit of threads about this throughout the whole time it was happening.
Plenty of the contributors have evidently been users of the service itself for some time, but were making their first appearance in the forums. I don't say this to point at the outage as bringing the unforeseen benefit of making their acquaintance, but merely to suggest it was easy to access the place even for people who hadn't been there before.
While the response from the business (a £10K charity donation, and communication of lessons learned) has been positive; the whole "run by the members" ethos proved itself fatally flawed last night.
As a comment on a previous Giffgaff story noted, their so called help forums are stuffed with smug, barely literate know it alls, and it's really starting to get on my tits.
Evil Steve 'cos they're a bit like Apple fanbois without the classical education.
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