Giffgaff get a little wet, major network outage ensues

We like Giffgaff. They’ve done things a little differently and built up quite a following. Today, though, has not been a good day.

A major service outage hit the network – one that took almost 8 hours to fix. Calls, texts and data failed completely around mid-morning today and didn’t come back on until just before 7PM this evening. The company has added a blog post which details “water damage to the computer network at our data centre”.

We’re really hoping that an engineer didn’t knock a drink over.

Reading between the lines it seems that networking kit got wet and this caused the issues. Redundancy is probably in place, but if core networking kit got wet, it’s a pretty big issue. The only source of water in a datacentre is in air-con, so I assume that this leaked or broke down somehow.

Link – Giffgaff Outage