You may be correct, but as a GiffGaff user I didn't realise there had been a problem until I read the news feeds when I got home from work. Mail, etc, soon caught up after the fix.

So while I agree network outages are not ideal, when criticism comes mostly from off net posters I ain't going to worry, too much...

That's not what the poster said, call100 - for anyone who is aware of what is going on via newsfeeds etc, they will be aware that GiffGaff has more than its fair share of outages, disruptions due to solar flares or whatever the next excuse will be.

I don't disagree that any outages are inconvenient, annoying, frustrating etc etc. and no doubt the GG one was all of that to some. They have a decision to make and that is their prerogative and my point about them not being tied. I don't think that there will be a mass exodus from GG.
You quote two of the biggest providers, Vodafone and O2, yourself as examples of very wide outages. It is not unique to GG.
This outage for GG was only it's second. The other one you quoted was not a national outage and only affected relatively few people.
I'm not that bothered if GG sinks or swims, I'm just using them on my personal phone while the sun shines and they are giving away a mobile service for free.
My business phone kept me in touch while the network was down. By the time I switched to my personal phone the network was back up and running. Selfish I know, but, hey!
Makes you wonder how we coped before mobiles!!

Re read the post! I never stated that it was what he said. I'm sure he can fight his own corner. He manages admirably normally....

Two outages is not catastrophic. Yesterdays and a 3 hour one in 2010.
This outage is the first time anything has not worked as far as I'm concerned.
That's the problem with forums and news feeds, you tend to have a skewed view of the situation a lot of the time.

Well we coped ok because they didn't exist, but now we do have them we need them. A lot of places need you to pay for parking by phone now either calling or SMS, it's very much the same for a lot of things these days.

A lot of people now rely on mobile phones to go about their daily lives, so it's important that mobile services are reliable. I never suggested there would be an exodus, those are your words, but I think it is an issue for their customers, there isn't a month that goes by when there aren't technical issues with the data service, the phone service, the websites, agents, number porting etc.

They don't seem to have built the network for high availability, and it's worth remembering they have probably cut corners to offer that value, quite obviously they have single points of failure where 1 site goes down and that brings the entire network for all services down, phone, text, data, website, the whole lot nationally for a whole working day.

Today's issue is random amounts of credit have gone missing from customer accounts, they say it's not linked to the outage, but yet another separate issue.

If one checks back the posting history of some of the critics of GiffGaff it is apparent they have a focus on discrediting it to support another network.

Sad but true even although Giffgaff targets customers that certain other networks don't really want. They are not into contracts or commitment or targetting high spenders, they are the bargain basement divison of o2 which like giffgaff has had plenty of negative posts for the same reason by the same individual. Below is an example of previous mischef making that ended up being closed.

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showt...862&highlight=

For most GiffGaff is reliable 99.9% of the time and has a range of frequencies to offer voice, text and data covering more of the UK than any others. The 1 month goodybag concept allows anyone to try it and if the customer experience is not up to their requirements they can leave without any penalty. So unlike others a mistake choosing giffgaff is not going to be punative and cost 100s of pounds.

I'm confident Giffgaff know they have to provide as reliable a service for their customers as the others for the reason stated above.

Anyone who has been affected by this outage and who is looking to try another network at similar prices might want to consider CPW's Talk Mobile SIM Only tariffs. They use the Vodafone network and offer 1 and 6 month SIM only deals with a higher level of customer support than Giffgaff.

In the meantime I'm happy to report that giffgaff is far from dead and operating as would be expected presently.

that would be 8h45min a year of being unreliable. i'm not sure that is a fair reflection of giff gaff.

Perhaps! 99.99% might have been a better figure! I doubt if 100% can be claimed by any operator!

True, and there are others here who simply object to poor execution, and and ever poorer service model.

I'm no GG fanboy and the incident annoyed me greatly. I've been lucky in avoiding most of the problems people have had re things like porting. I had one incident recently where their system wasn't working, I couldn't buy my new goodybag and my credit was eaten up. However a couple of emails to their agents saw me refunded 10p I'd spent so I could buy a goodybag with my credit without having to do a £10 topup.

They are so darn cheap and only O2 and vodafone based networks get such good building penetration (my friends can't get any signal indoors on Three in our building) that even with these problems it's hard to leave. It would cost me £60 extra a year to get elsewhere what the £10 GG goodybag gets me.

That said, another major incident and I probably will leave. It's quite clever how payback is only distributed every 6 months. I earned a payback in early December and I'm staying until May just because of that.

Try this for size: I'm a long standing O2 customer - and I tried GiffGaff because a) it "used the O2 network" which is one of the only ones available in my remote neck of the woods and b) it was cheaper than O2. Seemed like a good idea, based on the information that I had. Wrong.

Without going into the issues yet again, GG were a major let down (no less than four times via PM on their website with them saying "it should be working now, try again" and took 12 days before I eventually gave up).

So I just went back to my good-old reliable O2 SIMS and all is well, and I'd rather pay for a decent service, signal etc.

So your notion of an "anti GG/O2 vendetta" is quite wrong, but don't let that stand in the way of a good soundbite

Problem solved..... no further issue

Is anyone having any problems today?

I was fine from Friday night but today I can't seem to text or call again! I can only iMessage - which in itself is limited...!

Wondering if anyone else has any problems?

No. Its fine for me.

Full signal and voice and texts are spot on.

I had some problems yesterday and also today as well along with my wife's niece who I also converted to GiffGaff recently.

There's an interview between CNET UK and Giffgaff's CEO Mike Fairman here:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/giff...-ceo-50007389/

A number of things I want to point out:
Double quotes are actual quotes, single quotes are me paraphrasing.

1) He says "an expensive component" failed, he refuses to name said component several times in the interview and therefore I call FUD.

2) Giffgaff has only two-load balanced servers, both in the same building. Apparently too expensive to put any servers elsewhere - I mean WTFFFF? The datacentre capacity required in this case is minimal.

3) He even says that he'd rather have the same thing happen again (implementing a workaround) than pay for dual-site resiliency.

4) He says that as a start-up you should only expect 'start-up levels of service'. What poppycock. First, small companies can provide excellent service - Zen Internet has been a fine example for about ten years now. Second, a customer should be able to expect service comparable with what they can get elsewhere.

5) They've already been known for their BS, after proudly proclaiming about "truly unlimited" with respect to their data etc, now they're doing typical network hand-wringing like 'oh a few of you are ruining it for everyone else, we have to FUP too but we still want to call it unlimited'. You can't have your cake and eat it, either let large amounts of traffic like Three do or be more upfront about the data you do offer.

6) This talk about them being a start-up company is a highly cynical marketing ploy. I've met and spoken to a couple of people who've worked for Giffgaff. Not only are they owned by O2, there is significant operational interaction between the teams and they are not run as an hands-off subsidiary. Giffgaff is nothing more than a clever attempt at market segmentation by O2.

I can't wait to be off them, at some point the cheapness stops being cheap when the data speeds are so poor the service is unusable.

Same here - I am only with them until the Galaxy S3 comes out and gets to a sensible price and then I'm off.

Giff Gaff are a great deal, but what is the point on having a mobile if it's not reliable? I have not gone for Orange, T-Mobile or O2 over the years due to this as I do a lot of driving for my job (sometimes out in the sticks in Norfolk etc) and Vodafone and O2 were the only ones I could rely on (especially in the old days of mobile).

Some shockers there BigM, sounds like customers could see more issues in the future if they are happy with single points of failure in their network like that and have no plans to change or build a proper high availability model.

The whole network was down for 6 hours across the country for all services, so that's a hell of an inconvenience for people. I know I've arranged to meet friends who live quite a long way away before and said i'll phone them when I get there to meet up in a shopping centre or somewhere. I'd be well pissed off if after travelling an hour I couldn't reach them or couldn't make any calls. People want their phone for security, things like if the car breaks down etc.

The GG users I saw in 1 article's comments were posting various different ways in which it impacted different users, pregnant wives due to drop and wanting to be in contact, 1 girl said she had an argument with her boyfriend and she thought he'd ignored her all day, all sorts of things.

When I choose a network I would want good reliability, this is the 2nd time GG have had a national outage of all services. I calculate their uptime to be around 99.5% which I think is quite low, UK power availability is 99.9999% by the way. I really wouldn't expect an entire national mobile network to ground to a halt, I only remember this happening to Vodafone once, that wasn't national and that was due to exceptional circumstances from a burglary where a vehicle was rammed into a building and I think there happened to be maintenance happening at another site.

I don't remember T-mobile, Three, or Orange ever having lost the network entirely across the whole country.

Well, there it is, right from the horses mouth. They know their infrastructure is not resilient, and they are not willing to pay enough to make it so.

If signal security is your highest priority then get a dual sim phone and put Voda and O2 sim cards in it. That way you have maximum security.

I can't understand why anyone would be a 'fanboy' of any network, they all can be crap and all of them will let you down at some point, even if it is just the normal no coverage area. I have been with them all and I hate all of them, but especially T-Mobile because there signal was alway crap where I live but given the EE deal I may well be tempted back later this year if they are cheap.

If GG are a good fit your your phone use then fine go for it, but don't winge when they don't have the infrastucture the main carriers have as you are not paying much for the service. 6 hours without a phone - terrible. And that poor girl who thought her boyfriend was ignoring her, she must have been in bits, I really really really feel her pain. Really.

Interesting coverage of the GiffGaff CEOs response to the outage.

It is important to note that any outage is bad for a network and its users no matter if its local or national. If a city is affected and you live in it it makes no difference what scale the outage is on, you cant use your service and thats all that matters.

Just about every week there are outages small and large on all of the networks. The figure quoted of 99.5% reliability seems very low as that would mean a network would have to be down for 43.8 hours (nearly 2 full days) a year which I don't think GiffGaff or any others have come close to.

Here's a few of the many links to other recent outages reported on DS:

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1642937

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1633620

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=493320

Meanwhile Giffgaff, which I use as a secondary network presently, and find perfectly reliable so far, is back to full working service and they have made a nice gesture by donating £10,000 to a charity of the customers choice in leiu of the loss of service on Friday.

GiffGaff have to now get better redundancy in place or they risk losing customers as unlike others who lock folks into long contracts their users can switch in days if they feel strongly about the quality of the service on offer.

Ha, I totally agree with finbaar! I'm not loyal to any network, been with all of them besides Three (only gave them a test ride and the congestion during the day put me right off). Compared to other European countries, the coverage isn't fantastic on either of them.
And I think I could nearly write a book about how incompetent they all are (not always to my disadvantage though!).

I have applied for a giffgaff sim and had it for a while but hearing and looking at forums/twitter on their constant outages have really put me off and I have not registered the sim.

I do understand that they are a new company and there is always some teething problems but for a mobile phone company the levels of the problems that they have I think its unacceptable, recently got a phonecall from three offering a competitive rolling monthly contract around £10 unlimited internet etc - accepted no questions!

I don't understand the risk. You get £5 worth of free credit on a GiffGaff SIM (if it's been reffered to you) so why not just register it and give it a try? There is nothing to loose. Or you can add another £5 and have the goodybag with unlimited handset Internet browsing for a month.

Well worth comparing and its worth remembering that an unhappy customer is 10 times more likely to post on a forum than a satisfied one is.

Good point well made suppose I could try it out on a old spare mobile I have got, since my three sim is only a monthly rolling contract.