O2 UK Resolves National Outage of Mobile Broadband and Phone Services

Customers of O2 UK (GiffGaff, TescoMobile) have been hit by yet another major national outage of the operators Mobile Broadband and phone service, which began at around midday on Friday (12th Oct 2012). Roughly 10% of the providers subscribers have been unable to make or receive calls, send texts or use data.

The problem itself was caused by a failure at a key O2 network node, which is responsible for helping to connect and manage the operator’s traffic. It took just over 3 hours to identify and fix the fault (fixed at 3:30pm), although full service was not restored for everybody until the very early hours of this morning.

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 cause of O2’s problem appears to be different from the much larger outage that struck almost their entire network in July 2012, although that will do little to disarm any criticism for allowing such a situation to reoccur so soon after the last. On the other hand O2, unlike some of their rivals (e.g. Orange UK), do at least attempt to keep customers informed about their progress.