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eviljelloman t1_j6saunq wrote

People who say shit like “accidentally”, acting like there’s some sort of conspiracy, are fucking morons who have no idea how janky the systems at utilities are, or how incompetent their employees are.

This is a good old fashioned cock-up. To be malicious or sinister simply doesn’t make sense because they won’t keep the money and it just costs them money to fix. Stop assuming stupid shit because it feeds a narrative you’ve bought into.

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Semi-Hemi-Demigod t1_j6scfvj wrote

Based on the timing of the loss of data, I'm pretty sure they screwed up their on-call scheduling around Christmas. Someone was supposed to get paged who didn't or didn't see it and they lost the data over the long weekend.

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buggy65 t1_j6shdjy wrote

As someone who works in IT, yeah this is the answer. So much of the software in our world is held up by popsicle sticks and good intentions - it's a miracle anything works.

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trying-to-be-kind t1_j6tll2u wrote

I can believe the data cock up is a random IT mistake, but PPL's billing practice in response to it is suspect. If they had responded to customers by sending them a corrected bill and/or notifying them billing would be temp. delayed while they fixed the problem, you wouldn't have people so up in arms crying conspiracy.

Instead, PPL's response is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pay us anyways. Yes, it's going to cost them to fix their mistake, but the extra revenue its customers are temporarily floating them acts as a payday loan (of sorts) to fund the fix. PPL can then refund their customers at their leisure - sans interest, of course.

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