UPDATE UK Outage Strikes EE’s Mobile Network, Albeit Mostly Voice Calls

Customers of mobile operator EE (BT) and its MVNO partners (e.g. Virgin Media) are reporting that they are unable to make voice calls after a major outage struck the network. The incident, which is cropping up across the United Kingdom, appears to have started just after 10am today and is on-going.

Officially EE state that calls to the emergency services, as well as all data (Mobile Broadband) and messaging services, should be “working as normal” and ISPreview.co.uk understands that some EE to EE calls are also still working (this includes EE to EE MVNO partners).

However, calls to non-EE services (e.g. other mobiles and landlines) don’t appear to be connecting properly. Many people are also writing in to say that they have been unable to send text messages since the problems began, which contradicts what EE are saying. The operator has apologised and says they are working to resolve the problem.

The problems also appear to be affecting parent company BT and EE’s other MVNO partners, such as Virgin Mobile etc.

https://twitter.com/BTCare/status/917735042423709696

Whoever is responsible for copy and pasting the same canned statement to every single person who complains on Twitter is probably also having a very bad day, unless they’ve automated it.

UPDATE 11th Oct 2017

The problem was finally resolved just after end of play yesterday evening and EE’s CEO has issued the following statement.

Marc Allera‏, CEO of EE, said:

“At 10.30am, our network team became aware of a problem with calls to and from landlines and across some mobile connections. A number of our customers found that calls to and from landlines and across some mobile connections were not going through.

This was due to an error on our interconnect platform, which is responsible for moving calls around the network. Our engineers have been hard at work ever since we became aware of the problem. We’ve been rebooting the landline-to-IP interconnect across major switch sites, which should restore full service by 6pm.

I can confirm full service has been restored. I know that this has made the day very difficult for some of our customers, and for that I’d like to sincerely apologise.”