I received a text saying broadband won't work tonight from 7pm. Is this true?

[ASBGHJ]

I received a message saying that there won't be broadband service tonight all night. (7pm to 8am) Is that true? And if so, why am I only finding it out today and why am I not offered another service then. It's 2024, you can't leave people without internet for 13 hours! Had I known it in advance, I would have sorted something out, but it's too late and so sky is letting me down yet again. They don't care about people's mental health and haven't heard of proper customer service apparently.

[GD1]

@ASBGHJ  We are customers here so cannot tell you if it's tru or not, however if there is going to be an outage it will be for essential maintainence which would need to be done, no provider guarantees broadband 100% as there will always be a need for maintenence/repairs.

It's a fact of life that maintenace will be needed at times.

Also it won't be Sky forcing the downtime but the network operator Openreach.

I'm not sure how you expect an ISP to give an altenate connection when yours will be down.

[DRDR2]

It's a broken cable in need of repair, according to this message on Sky.com:

"If you live in the following areas of Oxfordshire, South East & Warwickshire, you may experience a loss of service between 19:00 10/10/2024 and 08:00 11/10/2024 as our engineers complete some essential maintenance to repair a damaged cable. We're sorry for any inconvenience caused. Affected Areas: ALDERMINSTER, BARFORD, BRAUNSTON, CLAVERDON, ETTINGTON, HARBURY, HASELEY **bleep**, HENLEY IN ARDEN, KENILWORTH, KINETON, LEAMINGTON SPA, MORETON MORRELL, PEBWORTH, SNITTERFIELD, SOUTHAM, STRATFORD ON AVON, WARWICK, WELLESBOURNE, WELFORD, BYFIELD, DAVENTRY, LONG BUCKBY, PRESTON CAPES, WEEDON, ADDERBURY, ASTHALL LEIGH, BANBURY, BLOXHAM, BAMPTON CASTLE, BURFORD, BRAILES, BARTON ON THE HEATH, BRACKLEY, CARTERTON, CHARLBURY, CHADLINGTON, CHIPPING NORTON, CROPREDY, CHIPPING WARDEN, EDGE HILL, ENSTONE, FARNBOROUGH, FENNY COMPTON, FREELAND, HOOK NORTON, ILMINGTON, KINGHAM, LONG COMPTON, MIDDLETON CHENEY, MORETON IN MARSH, RAMSDEN, SULGRAVE, SHIPSTON ON STOUR, STONESFIELD, SHIPTON UNDER WYCHWOOD, SWALCLIFFE, SYRESHAM, TYSOE, WITNEY, WROXTON ST MARY"

[Daniel0210]

@ASBGHJ 

You're very fortunate to have received a message warning of the essential maintenance taking place. Probably because it extends longer than the usual overnight maintenance times. 

[TomThumb5ive]

---

@ASBGHJ wrote:

I received a message saying that there won't be broadband service tonight all night. (7pm to 8am) Is that true? And if so, why am I only finding it out today and why am I not offered another service then. It's 2024, you can't leave people without internet for 13 hours! Had I known it in advance, I would have sorted something out, but it's too late and so sky is letting me down yet again. They don't care about people's mental health and haven't heard of proper customer service apparently.

---

" you may experience a loss of service "

9 times out of 10 you wouldn't even know there were scheduled works going on.

The odds are even less that you will suffer a complete outage.

Tom...

[TimmyBGood]

---

@BronzeShade wrote:

 It's a shame Sky's "superfast" isn’t quite delivering what they promise. 

---

Realistically all FTTC is neither particularly 'super' or 'fast' (Ofcom defines it as 30Mbs+) : probably worth remembering that this is an industry marketing name from many years ago when the alternative was ADSL at a maximum of 24Mbs.

[ASBGHJ]

Well, had I been informed earlier I would have sorted something out, but now I will be in freeze mode all day scared there won't be internet when I need it the most for my mental helth, and then my depression and mental health will skyrocket and there won't be anything I can do and it's too late to sort anything out at this time, so I can't even rent a line and now I have to wait and see if my lifeline goes away and I'm left struggling mentally and physically. I called them and apparently nothing they can do, nothing they can send to me in time. Now even if nothing happens, and the internet doesn't go away I have a complete day of living in dread. Not the first time Sky lets us down. But it is the last. Our contract ends soon, luckily.

[TimmyBGood]

---

@ASBGHJ wrote:

 Not the first time Sky lets us down. But it is the last. Our contract ends soon, luckily.

---

Worth noting that if it's an Openreach cable repair then every other Openreach ISP (including BT/EE/Plusnet, TalkTalk, Vodafone etc) would face the same disruption.

No domestic ISP guarantees uninterrupted connectivity over the national cabled network: that's physically impossible.  Going forward you might want to investigate services which have automated failover to cellular data at an extra monthly cost.