If you haven’t been living in a cave, you’ll be well aware of the O2 data service outage that struck down millions of people’s access to their data last week. The public outcry was ironically in its finest form on social media, for those with the privilege of access to WiFi during this period.
But there is a more serious lesson that was learned thanks to the outage and that’s our reliance on being connected wherever we are. Companies who rely on apps during this time were greatly affected. Deliveroo, for example, could not contact their staff for deliveries and care homes who allocate jobs to their staff were also unable to do so.
The outage was caused by an error from O2’s supplier Ericsson, who announced that the outage was due to an expired certificate in the software versions installed with these customers. This causes everything to fall over.
9 Group would like to apologise on behalf of O2 to all of our customers that were affected. O2 have confirmed that their service is now fully restored and they are carrying out a full review with Ericsson to understand what happened and to prevent it happening again.
In support of our customers, 9 Group is setting aside a ‘goodwill fund’. If you been impacted significantly by the outage you can register your request for a goodwill credit with 9. We will be crediting two days of monthly airtime subscription charges by the end of February.
Any funds unclaimed will be donated to the Princes Trust Charity.
To register a claim, please email bills@9group.co.uk before 31st January 2019.
