Ouch.
Seriously. This was painful to watch. In October 2015, the BBC and a range of other news sources reported that 157,000 people were affected by a severe data breach.
TalkTalk confirmed that more than 15,600 bank account numbers and sort codes were taken too.
The company's shares lost about a third of their value, and they were thought to have lost over 100,000 customers in the subsequent fallout.
And customers were incredibly worried - whether they left the ISP or not.
They were suddenly being given warnings by news outlets to 'avoid scam calls', 'change passwords' and 'monitor your bank accounts'.
At that point in 2015, TalkTalk had reported three cyber attackes in the previous twelve months so many users felt it was time to leave.
Things became slightly ugly when the company said it would only waive termination fees if customers had money stolen from them as a result of the breach.
TalkTalk about brand damaging!
At the time, customers were on the hook for as much as £23.31 for each remaining month that they had on their contracts.
TalkTalk felt the after-effects for years. in mid 2019, news outlets were still reporting on the fiasco when the stolen details were found online - and TalkTalk allegedly failed to inform 4545 customers were even stolen in the first place.
As a reflection of the seriousness of the event, the ICO issued talktalk with a record-breaking fine of £400,000 in 2016. Remember that this even was before updates to GDPR and the revised data protection act 2018.
In the new world, these fines could have been far more severe.
Fast forward to today and I think it's fair to say that TalkTalk recovered and is moving forward as a solid player - so if you reform after an event like this, there's potential for recovery and more importantly, forgiveness from the buying public.
In 2020, we think that TalkTalk has come a long way in terms of their security and their product offering. You can view TalkTalk's currentl products here.
