Hi Lightning,
Thank you for reaching out with your concerns regarding an ongoing outage in your area. I believe I've also responded to your comments on Twitter, so thank you for providing the fault references here which allow me to investigate further. I've conducted a detailed appraisal of the situation and am happy to provide further information for you here.
First of all, I'd like to thank jbrennand and Gary for their attempts to clarify our Automatic Compensation process and how different fault tickets work. They are valued members of our community and provide brilliant support on numerous threads across these community forums.
As stated on Twitter, I can assure you that we would never close a ticket as resolved for the purpose of avoiding contractual obligations or regulatory requirements. Fault tickets are closely monitored and would only ever be closed once the relevant issue had been addressed. All tickets are numbered chronologically, so you can actually see that the second reference you've provided is for a ticket that was raised earlier than the other. This means that the resolution of the later ticket does not impact the earlier one and would have no bearing on any eligibility for our Automatic Compensation scheme. As long as you have registered your loss of service accordingly, you would be compensated in kind for any issues which exceed 2 full working days.
As has been advised already, these two tickets are referring to slightly different issues. F008753175 is the master ticket for a fault in the wider area, whereas F008753324 is one of several tickets that was raised for a specific section of the network. Each individual "child" ticket would be closed down as that part of the network is restored or confirmed as being part of the wider fault. If you are close to the boundary of different branches of our network, you may find that entering your postcode on our service page brings up a fault reference which isn't actually linked to the cables use to provide your service.
In this situation, it appears that F008753324 was closed as the fault was identified to be part of the wider problem. There is therefore no value in having multiple tickets open for the same fault and all updates would be provided on the main ticket (whilst being copied automatically onto any linked tickets, whether open or closed). Unfortunately, any updates sent via SMS are automated, meaning that you received confirmation that the problem was fixed, despite the overall issue being unresolved. This does not mean that we are falsifying records, simply that we have collated all relevant information into one location for accuracy and ease of resolution. The reason you are now seeing a different reference is that we have confirmed the problem you are having is the related to the previous ticket raised. You are now seeing more accurate information for a ticket that was raised earlier than what you'd seen before.
Our local engineers have been working continuously throughout the day and night to restore full functionality to the surrounding areas. Unfortunately, they initially struggled to gain the necessary access due to a badly parked car. This has been addressed but there is a significant amount of work required to repair the underlying issue. I can see that our team have been on site 24 hours a day attempting to resolve the problem and have been providing regular internal updates. As the root of this issue has been investigated and the necessary work evaluated, estimated fix times have been updated as appropriate.
I can certainly appreciate your frustration at being without service, particularly during these trying times, but we are most definitely doing everything possible to get all services back up and running as swiftly as we're able. If you have any further questions or concerns relating to this issue, please don't hesitate to comment below.
Thanks,
Rachael
