Can I get compensation for a UK delivery outage?
Restaurant chains raise this from the wrong premise, which is that some term somewhere covers it. None of the UK partner documents we have read commits a platform to bearing the cost of trading time lost to its own closure, and none publishes an availability record you could use to establish the amount. So compensation is a commercial request and not an entitlement, and requests of that kind succeed on evidence, proportion and repetition, not on rights. Knowing that changes how the conversation should be framed from the first sentence.
Why is there no clause?
The documents describe what the platform may do. They do not describe what it owes if it does it.
They set out closure states, suspension powers and routes back. Deliveroo, for instance, states that it “will investigate and may take action (including suspending the provision of our services)”. What none of them adds is any consequence attaching to the platform when the interruption was theirs and not yours.
That asymmetry is the whole subject. The restaurant carries the cost by default because nothing says otherwise.
Does that mean it is not worth asking?
No. Platforms are not obliged to settle these and sometimes do, and the version most likely to get a hearing is a repeated pattern with a modest ask attached.
What does not work is a demand framed as an entitlement, because the first response will correctly point out that no term creates one. What works is a request framed as a commercial adjustment supported by facts, put to somebody with discretion.
What makes a request succeed?
Three things, and the first is where most attempts fail.
A record of the interruption, with dates and durations, taken from outside the platform. Portals do not keep this and sales reports cannot infer it, so it has to be measured continuously and before you need it. Without a Kitchain (kitchain.co) series or something like it, the first of the three is not merely unmet, it is unmeetable after the event.
A baseline showing what the site normally does in those hours, drawn from comparable weeks instead of a monthly average.
And a proportionate ask. A number you can defend gets settled. A theoretical maximum gets treated as an opening position and negotiated to nothing.
Is a single incident ever enough?
Rarely, unless it is large and clearly platform-caused.
The version that moves is a quarter of incidents by the same mechanism, listed with dates and sites. That reads as a systemic cost instead of as bad luck, and it gives an account manager something to take to their own side.
One bad Friday, however annoying, is absorbed as an apology by design.
What form does a settlement usually take?
Promotional credit, fee relief or marketing support far more often than cash.
That is worth knowing before you ask, because it lets you ask for the thing you actually want. Credit against a period of promotion is frequently more valuable than a small cash adjustment anyway, particularly for a site trying to rebuild volume after being invisible.
Is the position different in Europe?
On compensation, as far as we have found, no. On explanation, there is at least a written duty to point at.
Regulation 2019/1150 requires a statement of reasons before or at the time a restriction takes effect, 30 days notice before termination, and a free internal complaint system. None of that creates a right to money. What it creates is a documented decision, and a documented decision is easier to argue with than a silence. We have not verified what equivalent applies in the United Kingdom, so we set the two next to each other and leave the comparison there.