Three UK Investigates After Outage Impacted Some 999 Calls

Mobile operator Three UK has confirmed that a number of customers were unable to make emergency 999 calls following a major outage on Thursday.

According to the website Downdetector, reports of the outage first began appearing at around 1.05pm GMT on Thursday 23 January, but seemed to lessen overnight. Over 10,000 people logged outage reports.

However outage reports continued to logged on Friday morning, and the problem also affected Three UK’s MVNO networks, namely Smarty and ID Mobile.

Three UK said that its data services had not been impacted – only making and receiving voice calls.

Three outage

Three UK used X (formerly Twitter) to update customers about the outage and on Friday tweeted “Following an issue affecting voice calls yesterday, our services are now fully back to normal, apart from some localised issues related to Storm Éowyn. We are very sorry for any inconvenience it caused to our customers.”

Three UK had on Thursday also tweeted that it was aware “of a number of reports that customers have not been able to connect to 999 calls.

“Data from the emergency services shows normal volumes of 999 calls being placed via our network are being connected,” it added. “We’re taking these reports very seriously & are investigating this urgently. We apologise if anyone has been unable to successfully contact emergency services.”

Three UK told the BBC that it had received reports of 999 call failures affecting no more than ten customers.

“BT, who operate the 999 service, have confirmed that call traffic originating from our network was what they would have expected yesterday,” a Three spokesperson told the BBC.

Ofcom fines

UK communications regulator Ofcom tends to take issue pretty seriously when users cannot make an emergency call.

In 2023 BT had faced an official investigation by the Ofcom over a nationwide disruption to emergency call services on Sunday 25 June 2023.

Pronto is used by 20 police forces and more than 40,000 officers across England, Wales and the Channel Islands, and could now be used by 10,000 in Scotland.

That disruption affected 14,000 emergency calls and lasted 10.5 hours.

In July 2024 Ofcom fined BT $17.5 million over the matter.

And it is worth remembering that in 2017 Three UK had been fined £1.9 million by Ofcom, after it failed to ensure customers could contact emergency services due to a weakness in its network calls to 999.

Other mobile operators, including KCOM, have previously been fined for 999 call failures.

Previous outages

Since 2009, Ofcom has required all UK mobile network operators to enable people to call 999 – thereby allowing users to make emergency calls when out of the coverage of their home network.

Indeed, UK law requires mobile networks to take appropriate steps to prepare for potential outages.

When a mobile network is down or has no coverage, emergency calls should roam onto any available network in the area.

Three UK has suffered a number of outages over the years, including an outage in December 2023 that an outage that affected tens of thousands of customers on Friday and dragged on into Saturday morning.

Last month after the UK regulator, the CMA, gave the go-ahead for Three UK to merge with former rival Vodafone in a £16.5bn deal, after obtaining concessions (or “remedies”) from both operators.

Tom Jowitt

Tom Jowitt is a leading British tech freelancer and long standing contributor to Silicon UK. He is also a bit of a Lord of the Rings nut...

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