You know that line about meeting with triumph and disaster and treating them both the same? I’m not so sure.
We had a disaster yesterday. A small one – well, certainly small compared to the things I’ve been mentioning about TalkTalk. (We haven’t been hacked or anything like that).
But the database we use for storing orders and so on had a hiccup. In fact several – all at the same time (we have backups and so on to deal with a hiccup – but two things happened at exactly the same moment).
It means that if you ordered anything over the phone between the hours of 11am and 2pm yesterday (Wednesday 28th October) we may have lost the details of your order.
If you ordered by post or email it’s fine and if you ordered before or after those times, it’s fine. If you ordered and paid by card at the same time, we’ll still have the details of your payment so we’ll be able to tell you ordered something – but it might not be obvious what.
So if you placed an order between 11am and 2pm yesterday (Wednesday), would you be able to email us on [email protected] (or just reply to this email instead) and let us know your details and what it was you ordered?
We’ll check and if we already had those details, don’t worry, we won’t send you two copies of the order!
Huge apologies from me and everyone here – it’s not something I ever want us to be getting wrong. But I thought it’s best to come clean, and check whether there are any orders we’ve lost the details of.
And as you can imagine, I’ll be going over our systems and seeing how to make sure this can’t happen again. On the one hand, part of me is quite proud that with a big database failure like this we only lost 3 hours (and not everything during that time) – I’ve known a lot worse happen to other companies. But I still want to stop it ever happening again.
Oh, and the quote from Einstein? A niece of his wrote to him once and said how much she was struggling with maths at school. He wrote back with words to the effect that “However big your difficulties with maths, at least you know that I am struggling even more”. I’m not going to compare myself to the great man (though my hair does tend to stick up a bit) but it might be comforting to think that when you have problems with your PC or things go wrong, even supposed experts like me have problems too (It’s just most don’t admit to them…)
Anyway, if you did place an order yesterday on the phone between 11am and 2pm, please let us know. Thanks. And my apologies again.
Thank you for this advice about talk talk I have been really worried as this is my provider they tell me it will cost me about £134 to cancel my contract so I will just have to carry on and do as you say and keep an eye on my bank account. Barbara