TalkTalk loses over 100,000 customers and £60m due to last year's cyberattack

TalkTalk have revealed that they lost over 100,000 of their customers due to October's cyber-attack.

Customers were left angry and disappointed with TalkTalk because of their handling of the situation and their poor security services seeing as the company had already experienced two other attacks in 2015. In response, TalkTalk offered customers a free upgrade to their services with half a million customers taking them up on it.

The telecoms company took a £15m hit due to the high number of fleeing customers as well as spending £40m to £45m in enhancing its online security and infrastructure which resulted in a total of £60 million in losses.

The cyber-attack wasn't as severe as previously thought with 4% of the company's 4 million customers affected and no reports of stolen credit card information or other important data. Despite the loss of customers and revenue, TalkTalk has stated that business was returning to normal and expected to report an increase in profits. 

“It is encouraging to see the business returning to normal after a challenging quarter that was dominated by the cyber-attack. Both churn and new connections recovered during December and January and independent external research has revealed that customers believe that we acted in their best interest.” said Dido Harding, chief executive of TalkTalk.

The company also said that trust in the TalkTalk brand had improved since the incident and their consideration for cyber-security is a lot higher now.