UK Service Outage Map (National Utility)

Build a free, public, real-time UK Service Outage Map that helps citizens, businesses, and IT teams instantly identify whether a problem is local, regional, or national. Every day thousands of people waste time troubleshooting issues that are actually caused by outages at broadband providers, mobile networks, cloud platforms, banks, utilities, or government services. This project will create a single public platform that aggregates outage information from multiple sources and presents it in a simple, easy-to-understand map and dashboard. Core Features National Outage Map Display active incidents across the UK on an interactive map showing: Broadband outages Mobile network outages Cloud platform outages Banking service outages Government service outages Energy and utility outages Water supplier outages Transport system disruptions Users should be able to zoom from national level down to local postcode areas. Crowd-Sourced Incident Reporting Allow users to report: Service unavailable Slow performance Intermittent issues Complete outage Reports should be validated and aggregated to reduce false positives and provide confidence scores. Provider Dashboard Track major UK providers including: BT Openreach Virgin Media Sky Broadband EE Vodafone O2 Three Starlink National Grid Major banks UK Government services Major cloud providers Provide current status, historical incidents and outage trends. Smart Detection Engine Automatically detect emerging incidents using: Public status pages User reports Network measurements Public APIs where available Social media signals Historical patterns Generate confidence scores indicating the likelihood of a genuine outage. Postcode Monitoring Allow users to: Save locations Monitor specific providers Receive notifications when outages occur nearby Track incident resolution progress Historical Intelligence Maintain an outage history database showing: Incident duration Frequency Geographic impact Provider reliability Resolution times Generate reliability rankings and trend analysis. Public API Provide an open API allowing: Developers MSPs IT teams Researchers Local authorities to consume outage data. Technical Requirements Responsive web application Mobile friendly Public API Interactive map Scalable architecture UK-focused initially Open source where practical GDPR compliant High availability design Success Criteria A user experiencing service issues should be able to visit the platform and determine within seconds: Whether others are experiencing the same problem The likely cause The affected geographic area The provider involved Estimated resolution progress Expected Outcome Create the UK's definitive public outage intelligence platform, reducing wasted troubleshooting time and providing transparent visibility into the reliability of critical services used by millions of people every day.

This will ultimately be used to help vulnerable people in been able to understand why something they rely on is no longer available and what the current status for service resumption will be.

Produce a detailed product requirements document and feasibility plan for a UK-focused public outage intelligence platform. Define user personas including vulnerable users, citizen users, businesses, MSPs, local authorities, and researchers. Specify the MVP boundary versus long-term national platform goals, data-source categories, legal constraints, acceptable-use rules, public-source limitations, GDPR principles, accessibility requirements, and a phased delivery roadmap. Include risk analysis for false outage claims, provider reputation impact, public API abuse, social media data handling, and emergency-service disclaimers.

Produce a complete technical architecture for the platform, covering frontend, backend APIs, geospatial services, ingestion workers, detection pipelines, storage, queues, notification services, observability, admin tools, and public API layers. Include scalable high-availability design, local development architecture, cloud deployment options, service boundaries, sequence diagrams, data-flow diagrams, and trade-offs for PostGIS, event stores, caching, message queues, and map tile strategies.

Design the canonical data model for providers, services, incident reports, detected incidents, geographic impact, confidence scores, timelines, historical reliability metrics, notification subscriptions, audit logs, and API responses. Produce database schema drafts, migration plans, indexing strategies, geospatial modelling choices for postcode districts and approximate locations, privacy-preserving aggregation rules, and a standard taxonomy for broadband, mobile, cloud, banking, government, energy, water, and transport disruptions.

Create the full user experience specification for the public map, dashboard, provider pages, postcode monitoring, report submission, incident detail pages, API portal, and notification preferences. Include mobile-first layouts, accessibility standards aligned with WCAG, plain-English incident explanations, low-cognitive-load status summaries, colour-blind-safe status indicators, screen-reader behaviours, vulnerable-user guidance content, and wireframe-level component specifications ready for implementation.

Implement the initial open-source-ready repository structure for the web application, backend API, shared types, database migrations, ingestion workers, test suites, linting, formatting, Docker Compose local environment, seed data, mock providers, and continuous integration configuration. Deliver a runnable developer baseline with documentation for setup, testing, coding standards, environment variables, and contribution workflow.

Build the core backend service for providers, services, incidents, user-submitted reports, status summaries, and incident timelines. Implement REST or GraphQL endpoints, validation, persistence, pagination, filtering, error handling, structured logging, OpenAPI documentation, tests, and seed data. Include initial business logic for creating, updating, resolving, and querying active incidents without yet depending on real external data feeds.

Implement UK-focused geographic support for outage aggregation, including postcode district or outward-code level handling, approximate location matching, regional hierarchy support, map bounding queries, geospatial clustering, privacy-preserving aggregation thresholds, and APIs for querying affected areas. Include test fixtures, synthetic postcode data handling where licensed datasets are unavailable, clear integration points for official or licensed postcode datasets, and documentation of privacy constraints.

Build the first responsive web frontend for the national outage map using mocked and seeded outage data. Implement map display, incident markers, clusters, provider/category filters, severity and confidence legends, mobile layouts, incident detail panels, search by approximate postcode area, national-to-local zoom behaviour, loading states, empty states, accessibility affordances, and integration with the backend MVP APIs.

Implement provider profile pages and dashboards showing current status, active incidents, historical incident lists, basic trend charts, affected service categories, geographic impact summaries, and incident timelines. Include pages for major UK providers using seeded data, reusable chart components, status badges, reliability summary placeholders, SEO-friendly metadata, responsive design, and tests for key frontend flows.

Build the user-facing incident report flow for service unavailable, slow performance, intermittent issues, and complete outage reports. Implement report submission APIs, frontend forms, duplicate detection, rate limiting, spam heuristics, confidence contribution rules, geographic aggregation thresholds, audit fields, moderation flags, abuse-resistant validation logic, and clear user messaging explaining how reports are aggregated rather than instantly treated as facts.

Implement a flexible ingestion connector framework for public provider status pages, APIs, RSS feeds, manually maintained feeds, and structured imports. Define connector interfaces, polling schedules, normalisation rules, source attribution, backoff and retry behaviour, failure handling, source health monitoring, fixture-based tests, and a provider registry configuration system that allows new UK providers to be added safely without rewriting the detection engine.

Implement the first practical set of connectors and normalisers for UK broadband and mobile network providers using only public, permitted, or mockable sources. Cover BT, Openreach, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, EE, Vodafone, O2, Three, and Starlink where feasible, with fallback manual/status-page ingestion patterns where no stable public API exists. Include fixtures, parser tests, provider-specific mapping notes, source reliability metadata, and documentation of data-access limitations.

Implement connectors and normalisation logic for major cloud providers, selected UK government digital service status feeds, and major banking-service status sources where publicly available and legally usable. Include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, GOV.UK-related status patterns, and representative major bank status sources or documented manual adapters. Provide test fixtures, source attribution, incident category mapping, and clear constraints for services without reliable public feeds.

Implement ingestion patterns for energy, water, and transport disruption data using public APIs, open data feeds, status pages, or mock adapters where direct access is unavailable. Include National Grid-related public status concepts, regional water supplier outage patterns, transport disruption feeds, incident category mapping, fixture data, parser tests, and documentation for onboarding additional local utility providers.

Design and implement a safe, non-intrusive measurement framework for collecting lightweight public availability checks, DNS/HTTP checks for selected services, regional probe abstractions, and synthetic monitoring results. Include safeguards to avoid abusive traffic, legal/ethical constraints, configurable probe schedules, storage of measurement results, anomaly indicators, test probes, dashboards for source health, and documentation for running optional community or hosted probes.

Build a privacy-conscious public-signal ingestion and analysis pipeline for permitted public signals, including social media references where API access and terms allow, news/RSS mentions, community reports, and provider announcements. Implement source adapters, text normalisation, service/provider mention extraction, geographic hint extraction, deduplication, retention controls, aggregation-only outputs, and tests using synthetic/public-domain fixtures rather than storing unnecessary personal data.

Implement the core detection engine that combines crowd reports, provider connectors, synthetic measurements, public signals, and historical baselines into candidate incidents with confidence scores. Include scoring formulas, threshold configuration, regional clustering, time-window analysis, false-positive reduction, source weighting, incident merging and splitting logic, explanation strings for users, evaluation fixtures, unit tests, and documentation of how confidence should be interpreted.

Implement historical incident storage, analytics jobs, reliability summaries, provider trend calculations, incident duration metrics, geographic impact summaries, resolution-time statistics, and public-facing trend views. Include backend aggregation jobs, database indexes, API endpoints, frontend charts, provider ranking caveats, test datasets, and documentation that avoids misleading comparisons when providers have different data-source quality.

Implement account-light or privacy-preserving saved-location monitoring for postcode areas, provider watches, notification preferences, and incident-resolution updates. Include email notification integration with mock provider support, optional webhook alerts, unsubscribe flows, digest settings, backend subscription models, frontend settings screens, notification templates written in plain English, privacy controls, and tests for alert triggering and resolution messaging.

Build the open public API for developers, MSPs, IT teams, researchers, and local authorities. Include endpoints for active incidents, provider status, geographic outage summaries, historical incident data, reliability metrics, and source metadata. Implement API keys or anonymous rate-limited access as appropriate, OpenAPI specs, example clients, SDK-style snippets, developer portal pages, usage limits, caching guidance, and abuse-prevention controls.

Implement an internal admin console for reviewing reported incidents, managing providers, inspecting connector health, correcting source mappings, viewing detection explanations, moderating suspicious reports, resolving incidents, and auditing changes. Include role-based access design, backend admin endpoints, frontend admin screens, audit logs, operational runbooks, seeded admin workflows, and tests for high-risk moderation and incident-management actions.

Perform a dedicated security and privacy hardening pass. Produce and implement privacy controls, data minimisation, retention policies, cookie and consent strategy, DPIA-style documentation, threat model, abuse cases, rate-limit hardening, input validation review, authentication and secret-management guidance, dependency scanning setup, security headers, logging redaction, incident-response policy, and user-facing privacy documentation.

Create production deployment assets and operational guidance for a highly available public service. Include infrastructure-as-code templates or deployment manifests, environment configuration, database migration workflows, backups, queue workers, caching, CDN guidance, health checks, metrics, tracing, structured logs, dashboards, alerting rules, rollback procedures, scaling playbooks, disaster recovery plans, and cost-conscious deployment options for a free public platform.

Deliver a polished end-to-end demo release with seeded realistic UK outage scenarios, full QA test plans, accessibility checks, performance smoke tests, API examples, user help pages, vulnerable-user guidance, provider/source transparency pages, contributor documentation, known limitations, launch checklist, roadmap for live data partnerships, and final handover notes explaining how to operate and extend the platform safely.