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Yep, O2′s been suffering through a serious network issues for the last 24 hours or so; no data, no texts, no voice — that’s pretty much you cut off. Thankfully it’s now all fixed, but in the meantime it’s given us a master class of how to deal with the public and Twitter abuse.
Honestly, I was surprised by just how frank, up-to-date and useful O2′s network status page has been. That’s the way to keep people informed, short of a running countdown-to-being-fixed clock, I guess.
But on Twitter is really where O2 has shone. It’s had quite a lot of abuse thrown its way, and it’s dealt with it with aplomb. Just check out these examples and chuckle.
I think I’d find it difficult to deal with the kind of abuse O2′s got, but O2′s social media gurus showed how to do it with British humour, plus they didn’t take any crap. Hat’s off guys, even if the network failed badly, you did yourselves proud, and I’m not the only one who thinks that.
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Ah. Usual over-reaction when things go wrong.
Ok, be annoyed… but to start throwing this kind of abuse about?
I wasn’t even upset with it. But I know someone that lost money because of the outage and like this person there are probably many. If I was losing money I don’t know if I would be so calm.
A lot of business (and money) depends massively on phones. Some people will find themselves almost cut off entirely. And I can’t imagine O2 refunding people three days worth of charges. Some vitriol is to be expected.
Surely any business that relies solely on mobile phones needs a talking to?
I understand that you may have field staff, however that could be fairly quickly sorted (Depending on how many staff you have… but the bigger your company the more I would expect you to have some sort of fall-back) by getting PAYG SIM cards. Not ideal, but if it means not losing money.
At the end of the day… what good is telling some anonymous person on Twitter to “Suck dick in hell” or inviting them to copulate with their mother (Appears to have been removed now), going to do?
If you’re a business that has lost money, this ain’t the way to conduct yourself.
Oh, hasn’t been removed – I missed it at the very top.
totally agree. almost any interruption of services from an outside organisation could impair your business or personal life. the variations are almost limitless. there is no way you can expect these organisations to compensate you, obviously they need to supply a service within reason. if they don’t provide what they are contracted to provide, then you make a polite formal complaint. if your lifestyle/income depends on a system then you better create a contingency and try and eliminate or mitigate the risks involved.
freaking out, and being abusive is just not called for. reminds me of those many tw**s stamping their feet on those airline TV programmes.
aplomb – Not heard that in a while….Good work sir!
im on o2, as are most of my work colleagues. we have all been fine. shit goes wrong, gets fixed. calm down people!
btw – their twitter guys are great!
I really like recently that companies like this breath a bit of personallity into their twitter/facebook ect…
I lost my signal, but look I’m still alive.
Those tweets are awesome haha!
Worst thing that happened to me was a few appointments who had o2 phones couldnt contact me to let me know where they were. May have lost out on some business, but there’s always tomorrow