Mobile Operator EE Suffers Sporadic UK Network Outage UPDATE
Mobile operator EE (BT) has this afternoon been hit by a sporadic network outage, which started at around 1pm and primarily seems to be affecting mobile broadband connectivity via 4G and 5G services (3G still works.. sometimes), across different parts of the United Kingdom.
In a brief statement, which was posted to both their website and social media channels, EE said: “Some customers are experiencing problems when trying to use network services this afternoon. We are aware of this and are working to resolve this as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
Experiences seem to vary, with some customers reporting that the issue only affects their data connectivity, while others have been saying that they’ve got no signal at all. The issue also seems to prevent Wi-Fi Calling from working while on a home broadband network, but others have been able to get this to work.
UPDATE 23rd June 2022 @ 8:53am
An EE spokesperson said: “Mobile services were restored overnight and customers who were affected are now able to make calls and use data on our network. We’re really sorry for any inconvenience caused during this time.“
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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I don’t have any service at all, however wifi calling works fine, which is also ee broadband as I work for them
Just spent the last 15 minutes rebooting my phone and wondering what the problem was before thinking to check online. No Wi-Fi calling and no data on 4G, 3G works for data and calls although hit and miss.
I am also with ee for both and I have had problems since last week tuesday.wifi working fine but no signal and can’t use my phone to go on the internet
Plain old 2G voice service here. I’ve lost all mobile data and VoLTE/WiFi calling capability. It’s been down most of the afternoon.
We’ve hd no signal – “No Service” – in Highland Perthshire (PH10 7NP) since about 11.30 this morning. Annoyingly at the same time Wi-Fi calling(which we use all the time cos our EE signal is so poor) stopped working too via our still-ok BT internet provider with a thing saying “contact EE to enable Wi-fi calling”.
EE my phone doesn’t work. No WiFi call and no data. Absolutely disgusting.Time for a change.
We’re the UK’s best network, 8 years in a row! Thanks for your money!
It’s because you’re all not paying enough!
Starting tomorrow, 10% increase and 50% smaller FUP.
Haha
Brexit???
Thankfully no planes crashed during the down time after all after their last ad. Mine started being intterupted at 12.30 and kept disconnecting with fake full bars signal then goes to 3G mostly with PDP error with data meaning no maps or internet radio for me in the car. Didn’t work up until 3pm at that point I was in a local shopping centre and was surprised at the lack of people in the EE shop when I looked in when I walked past.
Sounds a lot like an IMS issue if calls over 4G don’t work + no WiFi calling, but no data connection makes me think that the EE data centre has just simply died lol
In West Wales: Our router remains on 4G LTE but the service bandwidth plummets to about 0.02 Mbit/s and then comes back a little to maybe 5 Mbit/s then cuts out and recovers. Often so bad the google “speed test” wont work. Fiddling with DNS addresses reconnected at its normal full speed 100 Mbit/s then dwindled over a few minutes back to the same old bit of wet electric string. Internet and Calling over Wifi affected. To me, this feels like a low level software update that has affected the whole network. Some poor soul in EE is going to/should get a rocket. But then again its BT the ‘no blame corporate culture’. Well certainly no blame for them anyway, they usually blame the customer.
I’m at work at a large site in Solihull and the whole site is down. Just read that it was supposed to be working again.
ONS!! Oh No Service in St Leonards On Sea and Hastings!
Anarchy!!!
Strike!
Loot!
Blame the People who use EE! Or
Just Fix It! Expediently!
All you insiders on here and not a word on what caused the whopping EE outage?
Outage was too big geographically for a single 7750 node failure (IPsec gateway)
I’m putting my money on the PKI SERVER failed, maybe somebody revoked the wrong cert ?
Come on, put me out my misery
Someone spilt a coffee on their keyboard
Any chance of getting to the technicalities of the issue as EE are being very tight lipped on it when I’ve asked.
Like others this outage caused me some major issues and headaches in the first few hours trying to troubleshoot multiple sites. The EE checker didn’t acknowledge this issue for at least two hours and even then went to a page that didn’t load properly when you submitted the form.
For those of you who want to know what took place, heres the RCA from EE
last update was at 1600 yesterday with a further update to follow this today..
Investigations identified a power failure at a datacentre to one of the high voltage transformers, This caused a 75% loss of service to the site. Service should have failed over to the UPS but that also experienced a failure. Once the engineers arrived on site, power was manually failed over to the generators. Support teams remain engaged with the work required to restore full resiliency and also to restore the power back to the mains power supply. Some work has been completed successfully within the Datacentre, however there is still some work outstanding. Currently the impact has decreased substantially with only a very small number of customers still experiencing issues. Full restoration will be completed today.
Well, if that is true then it begs these questions:
A single data center failure causes problems for the whole of the UK?
A network so badly designed it has a datacenter as a single point of failure for a whole country?
Continuity of Business (failover) was not tested regularly?
I leave the possible answers and opinion you might draw to yoursevles.
EE are fantastic. They are certainly not cheap but honestly I’m extremely happy with them
At the risk of jinxing things, EE took until yesterday to return to anything like normal here after June-22. Now the service is back to really fast again, and seems stable enough.