Telephone and broadband customers of Sky were badly let down yesterday when the provider encountered a problem which affected a large part of East Sussex including Rye. Users could get a dialing tone, but all outgoing numbers appeared engaged. Efforts to get action from Sky were fruitless, as the following incident shows.
We tried to contact our elderly neighbour yesterday afternoon, but her line was permanently engaged.
Knowing she is in poor health, I resorted to an old-fashioned method and walked round to knock on the door. She was unaware that the system was down and that neither incoming nor outgoing calls could be made. She is prone to dizzy spells and only that morning her doctor had advised her to call the hospital ambulance immediately if one recurred.
I returned home to report the fault on my landline. BT couldn’t help – not their problem, they said, but they gave me the Sky contact number. Back to my neighbour, to find another concerned helper; together we called Sky, but of course only reached a robot.
Endless questions in that mechanical voice and then the instruction: “this call is now terminated, you will receive a text message shortly”. Sure enough, a text message arrived by mobile asking for the fault to be reported all over again by text reply.
It was not reassuring when yet another concerned neighbour arrived only to say that the problem was general in the area and not confined to the one line.
For once, I appreciated the personal touch at BT where I was at least able to talk to a human being. It seems that Sky has economised on personnel employment to the point where the customer is carelessly inconvenienced, and possibly exposed to serious health risks in emergencies. That’s not good enough in my book.
Editor's note: As one of those suffering the effects of this and unable to access the internet to work on this paper, I was somewhat less than amused to be told by the same recorded voice as above that I "could obtain further information on the progress of repairs by going to www.sky.com". As the whole problem was that Sky's internet provision wasn't working and therefore I could not go to sky.com, I did feel that was rubbing a far too generous amount of salt into the wound. Connection finally returned on Thursday afternoon - nearly 24 hours after the start of the problem.
