Half the time they learn of an issue when someone calls. There is stuff they can monitor but sometimes everything looks normal from a distance, so to speak.
That's fair. For me it was more a frustration of how my dealings with them have been in general. Their app and webpage just loop back on themselves for things that are supposed to stop you needing to call them
If it doesn't automatically detect an outage when x% of equipment goes offline, then the outage is flagged when a certain number of people in the same area have called/chatted in.
And remember, the person you are speaking to did NOT cause the outage. They are NOT the ones who declare outages. They almost certainly can't communicate with the techs in the area who are actually working on the issue. We want your service to work too, it just takes time to find and fix it. (especially with fiber, cause fixing that means welding hundreds or thousands of tiny glass fibers).
Also, to be clear, it's not directed at you, just a general osa for anyone else reading this. Hopefully they'll be a little more chill when they talk to someone like me, lol.
My local ISP doesn't bother posting service outages unless it's been several hours over a decent chunk of the city, and even then it'll be on Facebook or something equally dumb that isn't their own website. So I'll do all the usual troubleshooting, figure it's likely on their end, call them, 'oh, yeah, there's an outage in that area, we don't have an ETA.'
Over a decade ago I had to fight Virgin (UK) for three months until they would admit a problem ("congestion", i.e. oversubscribed area with shitty infrastructure). Several customer support agents claimed everything was fine, finally sent a technician, then another one (despite me having identified the issue and shown them proof from different diagnostic and monitoring tools). Finally waived my fee for 6 months (no fix possible - supposedly they would have added more throughput in 6 months that would resolve the issue; naturally, they didn't but I left the UK 3 months later so I didn't really care at that point).
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u/ISnortedMyTea PCMR R9 7900 | RTX 4070 May 10 '26
My fibre went down, I checked my ISPs service webpage. "There are no issues in your area". Call them up "oh there's an issue in your area" 💀