New software silences Tomtom

I have just bought a Tomtom sat nav, but the company’s server is ‘down’ and there are no traffic reports. I bought the sat-nav especially because of the live traffic reports, only to find that I can’t get them.

Clearly Tomtom is keeping quiet about this and I have wasted my money.
Eileen Quin

We don’t know how long the service was offline, but Tomtom said it was only for a few hours. We know the company was not keeping quiet about this problem because Mrs Quin found a notice on their website explaining that there was an outage and apologising for the inconvenience.

Tomtom told us that it worked hard to solve the problems: “After launching a new version of a system last week, we experienced a number of small outages to Tomtom HD Traffic, which were swiftly resolved.

"We ensured our customers were kept completely up to date of the status of these outages through postings on our website and social-media channels and we’re working towards putting a new enhanced monitoring system in place to help make sure we avoid issues like this in the future...”

The Live service that comes with the sat nav has a year’s subscription to the traffic reports as part of the package. On its own this service would cost £40 for a year’s subscription.

If for any reason the service had been down for longer than a few hours, Mrs Quin could have had a claim under two laws: the Sale of Goods Act for goods not fit for purpose, or the Supply of Goods and Services Act for breach of contract in not providing the service.

However, there may be some clauses in any contract or terms and conditions that allow for brief outages.