O2 glitch leaves thousands in NI without services

Tech issue: O2 has had to apologise THOUSANDS of O2 customers in Northern Ireland were left without mobile phone data yesterday due to a technical issue.

UK customers reported not being unable to access the internet and other services across the network early on Thursday morning.

The company has 25 million customers across the UK with an additional seven million customers of Sky, Tesco, Giffgaff, and Lycamobile, which O2 provides services for, also impacted by the technical issue.

The first problems were reported around 5.30am yesterday with a spokesperson from the mobile network company confirming in a statement that it was investigating a technical fault, adding engineers are working to fix the issue.

“We are aware our customers are unable to use data this morning,” the company said on its official Twitter account.

“Our technical teams are working on the issue with high priority. We are really sorry and working as hard and as fast as we can to fix this.”

The service status page of the O2 website added that “voice calls are working OK” and apologised for any inconvenience caused.

O2 said it would share further updates as soon as they were available.

In a further tweet, O2 said the problem was related to a software issue in the system of a third party supplier.

“One of our third party suppliers has identified a software issue in their system. Our technical teams are working extremely hard to resolve this,” the company said.

“We would encourage you to use Wi-Fi wherever you can and we are really sorry.”

This incident follows reports in October that thousands of O2 customers across the UK experienced problems making and taking phone calls — a problem that the O2 website later confirmed was because of a number of phone masts not working in a number of areas.

At the time some customers said that they could only call people who were not on the O2 network.