SSE Airtricity website crashes after customers rush to submit meter readings before bills rise

Price increases are kicking in for customers of several Irish energy providers from the start of the month.

SSE Airtricity said it would still honour any meter readings at the old rate submitted by midday on October 2.

In a statement on Saturday, the company said: “We experienced a major system outage on Friday, 30 September which impacted our online self-service platform and the SSE Airtricity app. This was caused by surging demand which reached double our peak capacity for online service requests.

“We apologise to all our customers for the inconvenience and would like to assure you that no customer will be financially impacted by this outage. Customers can submit a meter reading to customerservice@sseairtricity.com and all reads received by midday on 2 October will be honoured at the pre-price change rate. Reads submitted by email should include the subject line ‘Meter Read’.

“Our IT and Operational teams worked throughout the night and our systems have started to come back online and operate as normal. Our team are continuing to monitor for issues throughout the weekend and ask any customer experiencing technical issues to please bear with us and try again later. Pre-pay-meter customers can continue to purchase vends from usual outlets and online as our systems come available.”

The €600 worth of energy credits announced by the Government is likely to be eaten up by annual charges, as a series of price hikes kick in today.

Energy bills are set to rocket this month as seven providers increase their prices, with four suppliers putting them up from today.

As families turn on their heating for the winter, they will see steep hikes in the bills hitting their doormats.

The increased electricity bills will see some families facing additional annual charges of up to €600 this time.

Over the past 18 months, average annual electricity bills have doubled to more than €2,000, with similar rises for gas.

This will pile an additional €1,200 to the cost of electricity for an average household in a year.

It means the plans by the Government to pay three energy credits, totalling €600, will only cover around half the higher costs in electricity alone.

The first credit of €200 is expected to paid before Christmas – but prices are set to see steep hikes during October.