[Resolved] Service Impacts

[J_PM]

Hey Community,

Update: March 8 | 11:00AM

Everything has been resolved and service has been restored for everyone impacted. As mentioned, we will be reaching out to those who were impacted as soon as we've identified everyone. 

Thank you for your patience.

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Please be advised we are dealing with an isolated technical issue that is impacting calling for a select group of customers. Please note: emergency services are not impacted. We are actively working to resolve this issue and will have service restored as soon as possible.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and will reach out directly to impacted customers, as well as continue to keep you updated through this thread.

Thank you,

• Public Mobile Team 

[PublicMgr_Alex]

Thank you! 
Done.

[softech]

@PublicMgr_Alex   can you put the update on Jade's original post (use the Edit feature)?  put a timestamp on each update

Some customers didn't read through the whole thread and just read Jade's original post and not aware of all the updates along

[lulu72]

Why is this only affecting some customers?

[PublicMgr_Alex]

Hi There, 

If you have no service because you are an impacted VoLTE enabled phone customer, you should have service very shortly, which would mean everything (including call forwarding) should be working.

Thank you,

A

[PublicMgr_Alex]

Our team is small and normally very busy working on all the things we can do to make Public Mobile amazing, so it's sometimes challenging to be fast with updates, but we appreciate the feedback and will try our best. As for the banner, we're trying to get as close to that as we can by promoting this post, but I understand the ask and we've already been looking into options - we agree. Thank you! 

[dust2dust]

You responding here the way you have has been massively refreshing from what has previously been the response level. Please do keep it up.

A pop-up or banner to reduce all the repetitive threads from customers would also be a help.

[PublicMgr_Alex]

Thank you. I'm on the community this evening because the priority is informing our customers, however this is interesting feedback. I will take away with J_PM the best way to capture great suggestions like this. Please keep in mind we are a small team and there are a lot of helpful and amazing ideas from people like you for the team to figure out! Stay tuned 🙂

[Techie]

Call forwarding is also NOT working anymore and is impacted by this outage.  

[PublicMgr_Alex]

We are receiving updates right now about service being restored. If your service is restored by 12 AM EST (latest, should be earlier) you will receive a communication. If not, it may be a different issue. 

Thank you

[michiru]

Hi, I am also impacted by this it seems - no ability to make calls for the past two days.  But no one has reached out to me.  Can I expect that I will be included in the group that will be contacted once service is restored.

[dust2dust]

@DennyCrane- I have only read about a couple phones that have the volte option available and or on. More phones would be volte capable but not as an available option (mine) which is what the new guy said. But on a US service in another sim slot it is on and available and used. (Also vowifi but it doesn't seem to work.)

[PublicMgr_Alex]

To those impacted: your service will be restored based on the timeline provided. We will send a follow-up SMS at 11 AM EST so we don't disturb folks off-hours unnecessarily. I will provide updates if we face any issues. 

[DennyCrane]

Aren't most devices VoLTE enabled these days? My phone is, and it seems to be working fine for calling and whatnot. 

[PublicMgr_Alex]

Hello @dust2dust , 

I am not a support agent, hence my naivety using this platform! Our team values your input. We're still working diligently on this issue. Thank you

[DDM69]

• After submitting a ticket yesterday, a Koodo rep contacted us and fixed the issue this morning. Now AGAIN calling is not working. 😡

[Luddite]

As emergency backup look at Free calling on wifi, even to phones without the matching app:

https://www.fongo.com/services/fongo-mobile/

OR

https://www.textnow.com

[dust2dust]

Interesting new development of a different employee user. I don't suppose you're support agent Alex_??? 🙂

Acknowledgment of trending rising issues is #1. Regulars here can spot them quite quickly. To hear official recognition is always helpful. To throw something up on the entry pages here would be enormously helpful for all the thousand repeat questions here asking the same thing. A big ugly red box saying we're investigating a possible problem. Click on this link for updates and the link goes to the announcement thread that had already been started. Then when resolved, change the message in the big ugly red box saying resolved and update the thread. Remove the big ugly red box the next business morning.

No one wants to tag employees unnecessarily (except the busy-bodies that like to whine about everything anybody does no matter how miniscule their complaint might be in the community goings-on). But sometimes issues do rear up and to have your response to them in a timely fashion would help smooth over issues that arise.

Or when some technicality is being wondered about by regulars or some internal change that affects customers comes out, to have your participation being from the horses mouth as the saying goes rather than second-hand interpretations from others.

Welcome to life in the community. I hope it's a sign of good things to come with more communication coming from the company to their customers.

Adding - REALLY nice to see these on-the-fly updates. Thank you. This is a breath of fresh air of communication from a communications company.

[PublicMgr_Alex]

Update: those with VoLTE compatible devices are impacted. A fix is in progress and should be completed by 12 AM EST. I will provide an update if not. We will be contacting impacted customers as soon as service is restored. 

[Lauchiemackinno]

Thank when will it be working it two days now!

[wetcoaster]

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@PublicMgr_Alex wrote:

Thank you. I am just learning how to post and edit (J_PM is our expert) so this is very helpful to understand! I will start adding posts instead. As for the rest, we reply as soon as we can, but I will review and we'll see if there's anything we can do to improve. 

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@PublicMgr_Alex 

Thanks for this piece of transparency. 

I guess the message is that, if the community is considered part of the support model, its members need those PSAs early on in order to work as intended, and we've had a disconnect in this process during many issues now.

IMHO there's no shame in coming out early-ish with a statement when it looks like something is up and then later, with proper diagnosis, coming back and saying "hey, sorry guys we were wrong, it was a [very isolated / different / etc] thing"...

And now I stop tagging you so that you can do your job. Thanks for taking the time to jump in here. 😉

[PublicMgr_Alex]

We're a small team and it's challenging to reply to everything amidst trying to build the best experiences we can. Thank you for the positive words, we're always trying to make things better and this is helpful! 

[PublicMgr_Alex]

Thank you. I am just learning how to post and edit (J_PM is our expert) so this is very helpful to understand! I will start adding posts instead. As for the rest, we reply as soon as we can, but I will review and we'll see if there's anything we can do to improve. 

[HALIMACS]

Acknowledgement is, indeed, progress @J_PM  & @PublicMgr_Alex 

Thank you.

[wetcoaster]

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@PublicMgr_Alex wrote:

Thank you for your feedback. Our priority is the current issue, however, ensuring our customers have all the information they need is of the utmost importance to our team. Thank you

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@PublicMgr_Alex 

You'll have to forgive me for not holding my breath. The regulars here have voiced these concerns re: delay or complete lack of communication about service or account issues so many times, it sounds like a broken record and nothing happens. 

As mentioned above, we'll happily let you dive into the trouble shooting and don't expect you to give us a minute by minute progress account.

Just acknowledge that there seems to be such and such problem and that you are working on it. Then come back and update when it makes sense to do so.

I also noticed that the op has been edited at least 3 times since it's gone up and has a quite different message now... Just to be clear I'm talking about getting updates, and not edits, so that there's some transparency. (But I'm not holding my breath on that either.)

[Jessine]

This started yesterday and today was my billing day. It is showing account suspended but public did not even try and with-drawl my payment. When i try and and make the payment manually it says oops something when wrong…

now on day two with no phone. When i call*611 it says sorry you have no plan.

[PublicMgr_Alex]

Thank you for your feedback. Our priority is the current issue, however, ensuring our customers have all the information they need is of the utmost importance to our team. Thank you

[LitlLdy]

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@esjliv wrote:

This isn't the first time that it has been suggested to advertise Here On the Community Forum by Public representatives when outages happen, or the community 'blows up' from many posts due to service issues.

I recall seeing this discussion many times in the past, even before the updated forum. Wonder if this 'cookie-cutter' platform could support it. Or, rather Public think this is important enough to implement?

Heck, even the Announcements get buried or don't stand out that much. They are dependant on members bringing them to the attention of others.

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@esjliv , well said! Thank you! Thank goodness some of you can post the words/thought I have but not able to write them out!

edit: It is pinned now but a popup along with it would certainly help more & faster even stating see announcement posted!

[LitlLdy]

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@dust2dust wrote:

A little slow on the acknowledgment. Is there any reason why you cant flash a pop-up when coming into any part of the site from anywhere? That way the community doesn't continue to get flooded with a million threads asking the same thing.

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@dust2dust , my thoughts exactly! Or would that cost them more to do that & in turn cost us more for our services? 🙄 I wouldn’t think it would though. Seems like it would be easy enough but I’m not a tech!

edit: I didn't see you get answered on that though in the response back! 

[LitlLdy]

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@wetcoaster wrote:

I've just scrolled back in the post list, and the earliest posts I could find that mention symptoms that point to this issue are from Wednesday afternoon. That's 40+ hours (depending where you are). We have reports from yesterday afternoon from people that got helped by some technician (escalated by a CSA, I assume) 24+ hours ago.

This announcement is 24 - 40ish hours late. 

People are understanding that a resolution has not been found yet. Just the acknowledgement that there seems to be something going on and that you working on it to get affected customers back on the line asap and that you'll update this thread with new findings... It would have gone a long way.

Edited to add: I get hit by the survey pop-up here quite often, some days several times a day, and there are websites that routinely flash pop-ups to entice you to sign up for their newsletter... If the forum software allows you to do so, a pop-up would be the most efficient way to let people know about issues? (I'm not an IP pro, it's only a question.)

@wetcoaster , I agree on all that & yes the constant popup I keep getting would work well also if they sent popups stating they're aware of ongoing service issues & are working on fixing it as quickly as possible! Seems logical to me! Or would that cost more for them to do that causing them to charge us more? 🙄

[esjliv]

This isn't the first time that it has been suggested to advertise Here On the Community Forum by Public representatives when outages happen, or the community 'blows up' from many posts due to service issues.

I recall seeing this discussion many times in the past, even before the updated forum. Wonder if this 'cookie-cutter' platform could support it. Or, rather Public think this is important enough to implement?

Heck, even the Announcements get buried or don't stand out that much. They are dependant on members bringing them to the attention of others.