Major Service Outage

[#1]

I noticed yesterday that my phone was not working;

Friends reported they were calling and not getting an answer,

I then tried to ring out, the line was completely dead, no dial tone, nothing.

Internet has not been affected, no disconnections, good speed.

After doing all the local checks to eliminate my end, I reported the fault via the PHONE text service.

An operative rang me, via mobile, and informed me that there was a major service outage until 14 Feb 2022, but had no further info.

I would like someone to explain please, why no warning of this outage was given, and how I claim compensation for the lack of service.

[#2]

@dejjones No warning was given no doubt due to the fact that it is/was an unplanned outage - equipment/cable failure which was not anticipated. Now you have reported that you have been affected,once the issue is resolved, you should receive compensation in line with Plusnets published terms and conditions.

[#3]

@jab1

Thanks for the explanation.

Once the seriousness of the outage was known, I would have thought Plusnet would be informing customers of the extent of the disruption.

I get the impression that, I would still not have known of the problem if I hadn't spotted it myself.

In fact the first response from the PHONE team was that they could find no fault.

[#4]

@dejjones That depends on how widespread the issue is. I understand it is described as a 'Major Service Outage', but that could just be your local exchange - a small one, not a whole area. The only time an ISP will inform of a MSO is if it affects a major area - say - the whole of Liverpool, and that would be via a message on their website, not individual communications, as that would be manpower intensive and close to impossible.

[#5]

Thanks for your post @dejjones

I'm really sorry to see your phone isn't working and is affected by a service outage in your area.

As confirmed above, I'm afraid that we wouldn't be able to provide a warning as these are generally unplanned.

Also, we use our service status tool for problems which affect a large proportion of our customers, rather than individual area-specific infrastructure faults as it's not feasible for us to manually report every supplier service outage.

If you go back far enough on the service information board, you'll see it's something we've attempted to do for planned maintenance in the past, but as it's an entirely manual effort it wasn't practical for us to continue to unfortunately.

As you've found out, with our new text bot tool Here though, all you'll need to do to drop us a text and we'll either be able to tell you by text why your service isn't working, or call you back to take a closer look & help further.

Regarding compensation, we generally wouldn't offer anything for a major service outage as they're normally classed as beyond our reasonable control however if you can let us know once you're back up and running, we'll be happy to discuss with you a fair & proportionate goodwill gesture for the inconvenience caused.

I'm really sorry again for potentially how long it'll take our suppliers to fix the fault, but rest assured as it's logged as a major service outage then they'll be making sure this is fixed as soon as they possibly can. 

[#6]

@Gandalf

Thanks for the explanation.

The main concern from my point of view is it needs me to report the fault before any action is taken.

My setup, which I'm sure is fairly common these days,is that I only use my landline for incoming calls.

So unless someone who has tried to call me informs me that they couldn't get through I don't get to know, and I may have missed important calls, eg from doctors who may not have the time to contact me some other way.

[#7]

Thanks for getting back to me @dejjones 

As this was a service outage, we were already aware and our suppliers investigating, so you didn't have to report a fault, though granted you did have to contact us for an update as we aren't able to make these known automatically.