Last week O2 MVNO giffgaff experienced the first major outage of 2016.
As usual, customers took to the online-only Help and Support section, but were fobbed off with the usual "It's not our fault, we can't do anything about it" excuses that were relayed from giffgaff themselves via the online community of customers.
I do use giffgaff, but never as my main network as the service is far too unreliable day to day - as well as experiencing more outages every year than any other network that I've used.
On average, giffgaff has around four outages nationally/regionally every year, which can't always be attributed to O2 or parent company Telefonica.
O2 manages to hold onto a much more acceptable network failure rate than giffgaff, which does make you wonder if "cheap and cheerful" is maybe not the best policy if you want a reliable mobile service.
I hope that giffgaff eventually manage to sort out these regular outages, as it would be a shame to see this network operator fail after five years. As Britain's third largest MVNO, giffgaff should have big enough balls to fix these problems quickly, if not prevent them from occurring as often.
The least that giffgaff should do is hold their hands up and tell customers that it is their fault for not investing in more robust systems, rather than hiding behind the online community of customers and saying that there isn't anything that they can do.
