There must be something in the air this week.
We’re holding our hands up -
SpinVox fell over yesterday, and we’re sorry.
What happened?
Well, at around 4pm yesterday afternoon, a JCB/Digger managed to cut straight through one of our inward telephone number’s major fibre optics while doing some routine work in London.
What did that mean?
Any non-carrier based SpinVox customer in the UK, France or Spain, as well as any UK-based non-carrier service (such as the Ping.fm number for the UK) – experienced problems, errors and at times – complete failures.
What did we do?
Got onto it at once. The supplier of our inward line dispatched a team immediately to commence repair on the severed fibre optic. This resulted in some services being restored in a matter of hours. The full repair job finished a couple of hours ago now but anyone still suffering problems should contact us immediately on service@spinvox.com with details of the issue.
What didn’t we do?
We could’ve have done better at letting you know what was going on. We put the message out over some channels, Twitter and Get Satisfaction being two examples…
But we didn’t put anything up on here, on the blog – which should’ve been the first thing we did.
People were disappointed and upset and we agree, this wasn’t the right move and for that we apologise.
Our customers, our users and our community are all things we take very seriously here at SpinVox and as someone quite rightly pointed out late last night;
“Sometimes things go wrong. That’s when you should *really* be communicating with your customers. Not just the sunny days.”
We learnt a valuable lesson over the past 24hrs folks.
In future we will be better at this.
Fortunately this was a one off freak occurrence, so fingers crossed it won’t be happening again any time soon. I’ve been working here over a year now and I’ve never experienced anything like it – but hey you just never know.
Thank you also for the words of support and emails received. As I mentioned earlier SpinVox is now back up and firing on all cylinders.
If you have any questions about any of the above, please email me directly;
james.whatley@spinvox.com
Thanks
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October 23rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
“To lose one fibre optic cable, Mr. Whatley, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose another will look like carelessness.”
– as Oscar Wilde never quite said
Well done for getting it back up. All companies make mistakes. Successful ones learn.