Over the past 2 days some residential customers were unable to access a number of our web sites including our MyAccount portal, webmail, sales site and our online help & support tools, leaving them unable to manage their accounts online and take advantage of our numerous self serve tools. We’d like to offer our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused during this period. Our engineers have been working around the clock to restore the service and we now believe that full service has been restored.
What caused the TalkTalk websites to be unavailable?
TalkTalk’s websites are hosted or “stored” in a number of different secure locations around the UK, known as Data Centres or Host’s. On the 26th December in the early morning, one of our 3rd party hosting partners experienced a total failure of their cooling systems for the entire building.
These cooling systems keep a stable temperature by extracting the large volumes of heat produced by the many computers and servers in the building that power our websites. Most equipment can only operate when it is below a certain temperature, so as the temperature increased, the equipment automatically shut down as a safety precaution. This then resulted in our websites being affected.
Unfortunately on this occasion the primary cooling units first failed, but then the secondary backup cooling units also failed. Over the past 2 days we’ve had teams of engineers working around the clock to restore air conditioning services, which we successfully completed overnight however our engineers are still working to improve the performance of these cooling units to a level which is acceptable to TalkTalk.
We’re committed to delivering the best possible service to our customers and to help us achieve this we will shortly be taking full control of both the site and the systems that were linked to this outage. Once they are maintained by TalkTalk, we plan to replace the necessary equipment and also introduce improved monitoring of the site's environment, which will enable us to respond more quickly to any alerts or issues, such as a cooling system failure, and therefore help prevent this type of issue happening again.
Is this related to the recent email outage?
The two outages are unrelated. We know email is an essential service to our customers and we’d once again like to apologise for any inconvenience caused by the recent email issue.
If you’d like to discuss this outage or need support with another issue be sure to visit our community. We’ve created a dedicated discussion thread about this issue, one of our community support agents will be able to help answer any questions you have, or assist you if you are still experiencing difficulties. We would advise you to contact us online first rather than phoning as it’s likely we’ll be better able to support you online.
Once again we apologise for any inconvenience and would like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding.
Last Updated: 11:30, 28th December 2014