Telewest manages to kill all TVDrives... 3 hours and counting

[mikerr]

Just in case any TVdrive users here think they have broken their box:

All TVdrives has been frozen and inaccessible since about 1:30pm..

No TV, no access to recordings, boxes are forzen on "updating, R---"

http://www.blueyonder.co.uk/status/serviceissue.do?ticket=396885

Some idiot decided to force a national update on saturday afternoon,
and its all gone pear shaped!

Bit of a flaw in the system that you obviously can't run TVdrive standalone
if their central server breaks....

[Pete77]

NTL cable always seems to be famous for randomly going down unpredictably for several hours at a time judging from the experiences my mother had with them over several years.

[Automan]

Most big companies have a total freeze on all changes during the xmas period to avoid such issues and key employees not being available.

Automan.

[blindlemon]

Nice :cool:

Seems like TVDrive has edged Sky+ out of the top spot on the 'steaming pile of poo excuse for a PVR' chart this week :p:D:D

[davisa]

My Father in Law had this problem, which we assumed was a broken box. Nothing was on the support site at the time, and calling customer support resulted in a 'we are experiencing a high number of calls. Call back later' message before hanging up on us. Truly terrible customer service.

[cwaring]

To be fair, if they are having a larger than normal amount of calls and don't have the staff to handle them (ie no-one expected this problem) then you can't really say they have "Truly terrible customer service" based on this one, unforseen, incident.

Unless you're actually talking about NTL and not TW in which case I totally agree ;):p:D

[nickharman]

the reason NTL go off line in my part of sarf lundun is the poor security of the boxes in the street. Seems once a week some chav jemmies one open and yanks all the wires about. Presumably they and their friends all use Sky!

N

[davisa]

To be fair, if they are having a larger than normal amount of calls and don't have the staff to handle them (ie no-one expected this problem) then you can't really say they have "Truly terrible customer service" based on this one, unforseen, incident.

Unless you're actually talking about NTL and not TW in which case I totally agree ;):p:D
There are plenty of ways they could have dealt with this though. Perhaps a message on their recorded announcement or a way of logging issues on-line. Simply to hang-up on the customer is not good enough. I'm also a Telewest customer, and to honest I've always found their customer support excellent, so lets hope this was a one-off lapse.

Luckily I couldn't see the point of TVDrive so declined their offer, opting to keep TiVo which I simply couldn't do without. It was weird to see a 'telewest' menu, because I'd forgotten what they look like! :)

[BrianHughes]

the reason NTL go off line in my part of sarf lundun is the poor security of the boxes in the street. Seems once a week some chav jemmies one open and yanks all the wires about. Presumably they and their friends all use Sky!

N

They probably don't have enough of a brain to connect their afternoon's fun and the fact that they can't watch the footy when they get home. They're probably the first onto NTL to complain.

[mikerr]

Not obvious, but TW did have a status of sorts on here:
http://www.blueyonder.co.uk/status/tvissues.do

actual tvdrive outage:
http://www.blueyonder.co.uk/status/serviceissue.do?ticket=396885