Thousands of Glasgow, Scotland-area customers of Virgin Media broadband are going to be stuck without internet access for over a week as the company estimates repairs for an outage will be corrected next Thursday, STV News reports. “We are aware of an issue currently in the Glasgow area, the current estimated fix date is January 5, 2023 although this is being worked on to fully resolve as quickly as possible,” a Virgin Media spokesperson said in a statement.
Eight days sure sounds like a high estimate even if we assume they’re doing the old “underpromise and overdeliver” to customers. Like if in reality it was only going to take a day then tell them Friday just to be safe and disingenuously earn a little goodwill. But even that would be too long. God knows how many of these customers aren’t just kids watching YouTube or playing Xbox but actually important commercial and human infrastructure like banks and doctor’s offices. This shit is going to be seriously disruptive to people’s lives and livelihoods in all sorts of awful ways.
Seems like part of a pattern of certain mission-critical products and services not being delivered for people who count on them for their needs are like “LOL fuck you… LMAO” to consumers forced to live with the outcome of their incompetence. Sure it sucks when Pepsi didn’t deliver any Diet Sierra Mist to your local store or when that cool Batman-themed roller coaster at Six Flags gets closed for safety inspection on the day you visit or when the Halo Infinite multiplayer servers get taken offline so they can patch some bugs when you wanted to play, but you don’t need them.
People do however need baby formula, Adderall, to get where they’re going without spending fucking three days in an airport, broadband internet, and all sorts of other products and services subject to similar interruptions. Yet capitalism demands that the means of accountability for failure to deliver the comforts of life be the same as failing to deliver the essentials. It’s time to start asking out loud if the market is going to remain the only “solution” to these sort of fuckups.