Virgin Mobile apologized to its customers who were left without service on May 3 during a network outage. On Saturday morning, postpaid customers of Virgin were not able to send SMS, make calls or use data but they were able to receive text messages and calls and even make emergency calls.
Because of Virgin's widespread outage, the company used social media channels to communicate with its clients. Representatives promised to post regular updates on Twitter and Facebook for more information.
"I would like to sincerely apologize to those being affected by this outage and let you know that we have all hands on deck to resolve this. We absolutely appreciate the urgency of the situation and are doing everything we can to get things back up and running ASAP," Virgin Mobile Australia head David Scribner said. The company also offered customers credit equal to the day's access fee.
Virgin Mobile has also suffered nationwide outage with its postpaid customers for a whole evening last March, which makes this latest outage the second time in six weeks that the telco was affected by a major disruption. Optus shares mobile towers with Virgin and when one gets into trouble, the other almost always gets affected as well. On the first disruption, Optus customers lost service too.
Irate customers took to social media, saying Virgin's statement is not enough. They were also angry for the telco's delayed response in addressing the problem that they still had to vent their frustrations on customer forums and social media before the statement was released.
"Could you please give us an explanation as to what actually caused the outage?" Alex Case posted on Virgin's Facebook page. "Still incredibly disappointed about the delay in notifying your customers that there was an outage."
Adrianna Connelly posted on Twitter: "Virgin mobile crashing nationwide: I will dispute with you until my throat starts to bleed. Not paying my bill this month."
"VMA, thank you for fixing YOUR own problem for not having YOUR own network working properly, as per contractually required to, in a postpaid contract/plan," Peter Nisbet wrote on Virgin's Facebook page. "One day's access fee as a reimbursement is not only 'insulting too low' as compensation, but manifestly inadequate compared to the amount of lost income, time and lack of suitable notice to arrange alternative means of telecommunications for this network outage. I will definitely be lodging a complaint with the Telecommunications Ombudsman regarding this network outage, if suitable arrangements are not voluntarily offered by VMA."
