England & Wales / United Kingdom Law

Terms of Service & Critical Life-Safety Disclaimers

Effective: 14 November 2026 • Governing Jurisdiction: England and Wales / United Kingdom

Not an Emergency Dispatch Service: Never rely upon this website during immediate life-safety utility hazards. Call 105 free across Great Britain and Northern Ireland for downed overhead cables or urgent electricity hazards, call 0800 111 999 immediately from outdoors if you smell gas (Northern Ireland: 0800 002 001), or dial 999 / 112 for immediate police, fire or ambulance response.

1. Acceptance of Terms & Website Access

By accessing or using UKOutage (ukoutage.co.uk), viewing utility outage dashboards, reading British consumer handbooks, generating dispute letter templates or submitting incident observations, you agree to comply with these Terms of Service and our Privacy & Cookie Policy. If you do not accept these terms, please discontinue use of the website.

2. Independent Civic Information Platform — No Official Affiliation

UKOutage operates strictly as an independent civic infrastructure telemetry and public consumer-information platform. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, partnered with or acting on behalf of any Distribution Network Operator (DNO), Independent Distribution Network Operator (IDNO), NESO, water and sewerage wholesaler, gas transporter, retail energy supplier, Openreach, broadband ISP, mobile MNO/MVNO, clearing bank, rail/transit operator, school portal, Ofgem, Ofcom, Ofwat or HM Government department. All company names, network identifiers and logos referenced remain solely descriptive identifiers of the third-party services tracked.

3. Accuracy of Real-Time Feeds & No-Fabrication Commitment

Our automated systems synchronise public DNO open-data APIs, Environment Agency hydrology feeds, Met Office weather RSS alerts, TfL unified transit status endpoints, BGP telemetry observatories and public status pages on scheduled intervals (typically every 15 minutes). While we maintain a strict zero-fabrication policy and display upstream incident designations transparently without inventing synthetic estimates, upstream third-party portals may experience reporting lag, incomplete postcode boundaries or temporary maintenance outages beyond our control. Always confirm life-critical or financial instructions directly with the relevant utility operator before taking irreversible action.

4. Statutory Compensation Calculators & Dispute Templates Disclaimer

Interactive UK tools hosted on this website—including calculators for Ofgem Guaranteed Standards (£95 initial + £40 per extra 6 hours), Ofcom Automatic Broadband Compensation (£9.98/day, £31.19 missed appointment), Guaranteed Standards Scheme (GSS) water rules, Ofgem Price Cap kWh running costs, solar battery sizing and Ombudsman/CISAS/CCW template letters—are provided strictly for general informational and educational convenience. They do not constitute regulated legal, financial or electrical engineering advice. Actual statutory eligibility depends on verified meter/service timelines, severe-weather category determinations, formal ISP signatory coverage and official ombudsman findings.

5. Citizen Reports, Community Comments & User Conduct

Visitors submitting outage reports or local street observations must ensure submissions are truthful, first-hand, non-defamatory and compliant with the UK Defamation Act 2013 and Malicious Communications / Online Safety standards. You agree not to:

Post knowingly false emergency hazards, fabricated utility failures or misleading outage locations.
Publish private personal information belonging to third parties, including full household street door numbers, telephone numbers or employee names.
Submit unsolicited commercial advertising, phishing links, affiliate spam, profanity or abusive commentary targeting engineers or neighbours.

UKOutage reserves the right to moderate, edit for privacy (such as redacting specific street numbers down to postcode districts) or remove any user submission immediately without prior notice.

6. Acceptable Technical Use & Automated Scraping Prohibition

Automated bulk harvesting, aggressive headless scraping, vulnerability scanning, DDoS flooding, attempting to bypass rate limits or mirroring full HTML/database structures for competing commercial feeds without prior written permission is strictly prohibited and may result in permanent IP blocking. Authorised local councils, parish websites and community portals wishing to display live UK regional status cleanly may use our official Embeddable Outage Widget.

7. Intellectual Property, Open Government Licence & Fair Dealing

Original software code, custom guides, database schemas, British visual assets and tool interfaces on UKOutage are protected by UK and international copyright law. Underlying official UK public datasets reproduced under Open Government Licence (OGL v3.0) or operator open-data portals remain subject to their respective upstream licences. Further copyright and trade mark details are documented on our Copyright & Notice Policy page.

8. Limitation of Liability (UK Statutory Safeguards)

To the fullest extent permitted under the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and the Consumer Rights Act 2015, UKOutage and its contributors provide the website on an "as-is" and "as-available" basis without implied warranties of uninterrupted uptime or fitness for emergency dispatch. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation or any statutory consumer liability that cannot lawfully be excluded under United Kingdom law.

9. Changes & Governing Law Enquiries

These Terms of Service are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales, and any disputes shall be subject to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales (preserving mandatory statutory protections for consumers domiciled in Scotland or Northern Ireland). Formal legal enquiries may be sent via our Contact Desk or emailed to [Protected Email — Enable JS].