Following on from the widespread Virgin Media outage across Rother Valley the last few days, Alexander Stafford MP for Rother Valley, has written to Virgin Media CEO, Lutz Schuler asking for answers for the huge disruption as well as asking for compensation for those affected during this time. This outage, caused by a severed fibre-optic cable cut services across Rother Valley, (including Treeton, Dinnington, Harthill, Wales, Aston, Aughton, Kiveton Park, Swallownest, and Ulley) as well as further afield to Rawmarsh, Parkgate and Kimberworth cut internet, phone and television services, leading to people being isolated and unable to work.
Alexander Stafford MP said “I have received huge numbers of complaints that constituents have lost money from the loss of the day’s work, either because their employer will not pay them for a day of not working or because they own their own businesses and could not trade online. For the businesses which are physically open, some reported that their card machines and other vital technologies would not work due to the internet outage. Many people face very unhappy employers, and some were compelled to take unnecessary leave days from their limited holiday allowance due to their inability to work from home. This is holiday that they should be saving up so that they can reward themselves for their resilience once this pandemic is over. Lots of people had to pay huge sums to mobile networks in order to use their 4G mobile ‘hotspot’ connection as they had no alternative if they wanted to work. In the interconnected and online world we live in, an outage of this scale and duration would be concerning during normal times. During this pandemic, it is an issue of the utmost seriousness.”
