Three network failure: your rights

Once upon a time, a day’s outage of a mobile phone network would not have been headline news. That time is long gone.

There’s a good reason so many of those apocalypse dramas include a loss of comms. If your phone fails these days, everyday life can quickly follow suit.

Which is why, when Three’s network functionality seemed to collapse out of the blue late on Wednesday evening, it is fair to say that Thursday did not go well for thousands of the business’s 10.1 million active customers.

With precious little information available (to those with wifi at least) as to what was going on, why and how it would be resumed, the response from many paying clients was fury, save for some inappropriately sassy tweets.

But this is not the first time British consumers have experienced widespread service failures.

And while some were turning to Twitter to voice their disbelief at the scale of the reaction, for others, being unexpectedly unable to connect to the outside world could have tangible repercussions on work and private life, including financial ones.

Here are your rights and the best ways to complain if that includes you. If not, maybe file it somewhere for the next time the apocalypse comes around.

Reasonable care

The expectation that the services you pay for will work properly and consistently is enshrined in law under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. It states that you are entitled to services to be carried out with reasonable skill and care.

If it isn’t, you may claim a full refund for the time you were unable to use your phone as a result of the outage. When you break it down, it’s probably not huge amounts, unless you’re paying a crazy amount of money for your contract.

The key thing to remember is that you’re also entitled to redress for any out-of-pocket expenses you incurred as a direct consequence of being unable to use any of your phone’s usual functionality. For example, if you had to use a payphone to make calls, the cost of those calls could be the subject of a refund. But it may also cover your costs if you incurred bank charges because you couldn’t transfer money.

Keep a detailed note of what impact the loss of functionality had, including the times, actions and direct financial consequences and then once the system is working again calculate your losses.

Write to the business involved rather than calling so you have records of evidence, outline the problems you had, the costs you incurred and provide the evidence. Then clarify what you want the business to do about, remembering to state that you are seeking redress because of a breach of the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Do it as soon as you can, if only to avoid the queue. You could also complain directly to the CEO. They are unlikely to respond personally but your complaint will be dealt with in a different way to standard customer services complaints.

On this latest outage itself, Ofcom, the communications industry regulator, says that while no one can guarantee an entirely fault-free service, your provider should be working hard to maintain the level of service they promised.

The regulator says: “In more extreme cases, where repairs take much longer (for example, it takes longer than usual to access a mast site to undertake repairs), you may be entitled to an additional refund or account credit. In cases where you have been without service for some time, you may also have the right to leave the contract without penalty. There may be a term in your contract saying you can do this if your provider has failed in its obligations to you or breached a key condition.”

Helen Dewdney, a consumer affairs specialist and author who is also known as the Complaining Cow, believes that few people will be significantly out of pocket from this week’s hiccup, but the bizarre and slow response from Three could have a knock-on effect. “Three customers on Twitter are saying that they have been pleased with the company’s service for years and can forgive them for this downtime,” she says. “But they are unimpressed with the speed with which it acknowledged the problem and the lack of clarity about the issue and when it will be fixed. Three really needs to improve its customer service and communications if it doesn’t want to lose customers over this.”

Regularly cited as one of the UK’s more reliable networks, Three’s share price had slipped as news of the outage emerged but finished up by the end of the trading day.