Originally Posted by
call100:
“Of course it isn't..............It's something that happened beyond their control...............For what it's worth, this is the first time in two years I've had any downtime from them. So your observations are not universal or necessarily a representation of the facts.
”
What IS a fact is that flooding is not national. This incident seems to have been at a single location and yet brought down the netire Giffgaff network. What is also fact are the messages Giffgaff have been putting on their website about a) investigating and reacting to the incident and b) actions for their website to react to today's load.
It shows the following: a single point of failure, insufficient failovers, no disaster recovery plan that can be automatically enacted etc. These are all things we can legitimately criticise them for and should criticise them for.
A datacentre power outage should have affected no more than a single region unless it was something major like the London Internet eXchange (LIX). This clearly shows how Giffgaff's network has been designed and run on the cheap. The fact that their website can't even handle the load and they have to move hosting providers in response to people visiting their website wondering what the eff is going is a pretty poor show too.
I've been annoyed at their flaky data service and slow data for a while now. For me, once I get my next payback from them in May, I'm jumping ship to Three even though they cost £5 more per month.