Forum Discussion

klomas's avatar
klomas
Joining in
5 hours ago

Compensation for loss of services

Hello!

I've had an outage since Tuesday afternoon. The time for the fix keeps getting pushed by an hour until eventually the next day (now saying it'll be fixed tomorrow by 9am, but I expect it'll get pushed again last minute). I work from home so this isn't ideal.

How long of disrupted services before compensation is offered? I ask as I got a message on Wednesday saying it was fixed (it wasn't), immediately followed by another message saying the fix was delayed again. Now, when I check on my account, it doesn't have the message saying I've registered for compensation.

It feels like the message saying it was fixed was to avoid compensation. I had the same thing happen a couple years ago where I never got compensation, even after raising it, when I didn't have Internet for several days.

If I'm not paid compensation again this time, is there anything else I'd need to do before raising it with the ombudsman?

Thanks for your help

2 Replies

  • japitts's avatar
    japitts
    Very Insightful Person
    5 hours ago

    As long as you've registered your loss-of-service, then the updates given by the status tool are subsequently irrelevant providing you meet the criteria on https://www.virginmedia.com/help/billing-and-payments/automatic-compensation

    Only broadband & landline telephony are covered, and there's a 2working day period from the outage. My understanding is that if you registered LOS on Tuesday, then Wednesday & Thursday count as grace, and the £9.98 per day will start registering on Friday unless the fault is rectified before 23:59 on Friday PM - in which case nothing is payable.

    Ofcom don't consider individual customer complaints except for statistical purposes, but VM do have a formal complaints process which allows for referral to external arbitration after 8weeks.

  • goslow's avatar
    goslow
    Alessandro Volta
    4 hours ago

    VM has 30 days from when your service was reinstated to credit you with any compo due.

    The most important thing is to log the issue with VM as a 'total loss of service' and to re-state that you still have a TLS if VM is claiming a fix has been implemented. Best way to do this is to phone in.

    VM's track record is somewhat 'patchy', in the topics on here, when it comes to paying the correct compo so make sure you keep detailed notes of everything to ensure you get the correct amount due if you qualify