O2 Apologises For 12 Hour Service Outage

O2 has apologised for a problem with its network yesterday that left many customers unable to make or receive calls or text messages.

The operator first acknowledged the disruption at 10.45am yesterday and claimed the fault, which apparently affected around one percent of its subscribers, had been resolved by 11.45pm last night.

“The intermittent problems experienced by some of our customers yesterday has now been resolved,” said the operator. “Routine upgrade work on our 2G and 3G networks led to unexpected congestion affecting around 1% of O2 customers. We apologise to those customers and thank them for their patience.”

O2 outage

However a number of O2 users are still complaining about problems on Twitter, suggesting the aftershocks of the fault are still being felt. The operator had not responded to TechWeekEurope’s requests for an update at the time of publication.

The outage is one of several to occur on the O2 network in the last two years, the most recent of which saw one in ten of its customers unable to make calls or access data services due to a traffic management failure in October last year.

Many customers threatened to leave O2 at the earliest available opportunity as it was the second major outage to occur that year. In July 2012, a fault with one of O2’s systems meant that some mobile phone numbers were not registering correctly on the network

This followed another outage in May 2011 after customers in East London, North London, Kent and Sussex experienced service disruption following theft and vandalism.

The damage to O2’s reputation could not come at a worse time. It is currently trying to attract users to its 4G service, which launched last August, and is now available in Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry, Leicester, Leeds, London, Nottingham and Sheffield.

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