Hundreds of households in York lost their Sky broadband last week and many were angry at the lack of information.
Now the company has promised to do better after an official complaint.
A Sky Broadband outage caused widespread problems in the city and beyond on Wednesday night (10 August).
The problem affected postcodes including YO23, YO24, YO26, YO31 and YO43 according to an outage site.
Sky published a notice which said: “There’s an outage on our network. If your broadband isn’t working, you might be affected by a large outage on our network at the moment.
“We know it’s frustrating, but you don’t need to call us. We already have engineers investigating to get you back up and running as soon as we can.”
But people were critical about the lack of communications from Sky after that.
One of those affected said: “You spend ages going through diagnostics because your mobile signal is shocking in the house and there is no WiFi only to find it isn’t your problem.”
Official complaint
An official complaint was made to Sky about the fact that there was no further information on their social media feeds until the morning.
By then the seven hour outage was fixed. However this disrupted many people trying to work and prepare for the morning.
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Sky’s Press office did not address the issue of communication when asked. They only gave YorkMix a brief statement:
“We have resolved the issue affecting some Sky Broadband and Talk customers in York. This was due to faulty equipment which required a fix by engineers on site. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.”
But YorkMix journalist David Dunning, who was also affected by the outage, made an official complaint saying he was not so worried about the actual outage as the lack of information he and other customers received.
He suggested that when this happens Sky follow the example of Northern Powergrid, with better online details of the scale of the issue and the estimated time service will resume.
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He added that during a major outage across the UK was no time to be switching off the twitter feed.
Sky’s Monica in Customer services replied:
“I appreciate that you took the time to highlight this to us. Please be assured, we value you as a customer and assure you that your feedback has been taken into consideration.
“We will also implement this feedback to improve the service we provide.”
Another reply to the complaint, there were three in total, said:
“Your experiences will be used to help us address some obvious training needs with the objective of ensuring such circumstances cannot reoccur.”