Planned Maintenance with no warning

[Ollie848]

Internet suddenly cut off at 1am and after checking the service centre it appears there is 3 nights of planned maintenance with FIVE HOURS of no internet for the next three nights.

Firstly, I'm aware maintenance is a thing but I have never encountered such extensive prolonged maintenance in my entire life. Fifteen hours of the week is completely unwarranted and beginning at 1am is not suitable downtime.

Second - Not a single bit of notice. An email, text, letter, ANYTHING would have been better than none at all. I'm not sure what fantasy world Talktalk live in where we have the Service Status as our Home Page for a daily-check in, but it's not the real one. I'm reliant on internet to work from home, had I known there was going to be an outage it would have been potentially possible to alter my usual arrangement. No notice? No alternative arrangement. I'm certain I'm not the only one that will have been completely shafted by this - other home workers, students on deadlines, whomever else. If you are going to have EXTENSIVE maintenance then notice would be the first common courtesy.

Finally - no compensation of any sort offered. No cursory credit. It's just accepted that the customer will happily take 15 hours of downtime, without notice, without care. I only switched to Talktalk a couple of months ago and purely for the Gigabit internet and the regret levels are already pretty high thanks to this problem. Coming from a company where I can call up 24-7, have an engineer round the next day to solve problems, and no maintenance (planned or otherwise) that resulted in disruption - to this absolute joke.

Cancel the next two evenings and sort out a more reasonable maintenance issue with plenty of notice.

/rant

[Chris-TalkTalk]

Thanks for your feedback, apologies again for any inconvenience. I've changed your username as requested

Chris

[Ollie848]

Hi Chris,

I appreciate there will always be people affected. I obviously don't have the data, but anecdotally 1am is not a low-activity time and a smaller more frequent window from 3am-5:30am would probably have significantly less impact. 

Either way Talktalk has our contact details - there should be notice of maintenance, or at the very least an opt-in to notification of planned maintenance. This has been a standard feature of various companies across a variety of fields - including many which are far less critical than internet access. I note that there is no absence of notifications for redundant features such as "badge completion."

Please change my Username to Ollie848 or a similar numerical variant if unavailable.

[Chris-TalkTalk]

Hi,

Welcome to the Community. I'm really sorry for any inconvenience caused by this issue. We do try to schedule essential maintenance for times when customers are likely to be least affected but unfortunately there's probably never a time that would suit everyone

Regarding your username, I can change that for you, just let me know what you'd like me to change it too

Chris

[Gliwmaeden2]

Staff can help you set up a different user name, @Ollie848.

The notices about maintenance are posted c 18 hours in advance, at the start of the usual working day. 

Of course many people don't work "normal" hours, and many work shifts, study etc, so it is always going to inconvenience some customers.

Most of the current works are part of the massive infrastructure changes going on, and the telecoms companies need considerable amounts of time to do the work.

It would cost us all more if this were not done cost effectively and efficiently. 

Now that you realise that it is happening, keep an eye on the service page!

Hopefully the worst of it will be done soon in your area!

[Ollie848]

Additional 😠 for having a default username that can't be changed and doxes myself. Good job on the security aspects Talktalk.