O2 apologize for UK outage

Around 10% of the firm’s 23 million customers are believed to have been affected by the yesterday’s outage problem, with O2 admitting people in some areas had been unable to make or receive calls, texts or access data services.

Last night, an O2 spokesperson told Sky News: "Further to our previous update where some customers in some areas were unable to make or receive calls, send texts or use data, service has been fully restored for all remaining impacted customers.

"Once again we’re are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused."

Asked about whether any compensation would be offered, the spokesperson said: ”Our first priority was to get customers back up and in service. We’ll now need to conduct a full investigation into the cause of the problem.”

The problem began when one of O2’s network nodes, which help connect and manage traffic, failed at lunchtime.

O2 : Update – 13 October 00:52
Further to our previous update where some customers in some areas were unable to make or receive calls, send texts or use data, service has now been fully restored for all remaining impacted customers.
Our engineers continue to monitor the situation through the night. Customers still experiencing issues should try to power the phone off and on. Once again we’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

The latest glitch came just three months after the firm’s customers had to endure a 24-hour service outage. O2 pointed out that the cause of the problem was different to July’s, but admitted it  had a similar impact on its customers, albeit fewer of them. The company had only just recovered from a separate problem that began on Thursday, involving people unable to make calls or use data with some 2G phones. O2 said it had had a problem with its 2G service in northwest Scotland, and anyone with a 2G phone would not be able to use it for calls, texts, email, or the internet. Its 3G service had still been working and the 2G problem was marked up as "fixed" at 9.25am on Friday.

As services returned to normal, chief executive Ronan Dunne told Sky News he was "embarrassed" by the network fault and worried about the potential for a backlash.

He blamed the disruption on a "piece of network hardware which manages the registration of handsets" and insisted such an issue was extremely rare.

I presume GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile users were also affected?  Not good.

Source: Sky

Posted by: James