Day of chaos as service outage left thousands without mobiles

AFTER a nationwide outage yesterday that affected thousands of O2 customers in Bristol yesterday, data connectivity began to return to some customers during the evening.

More than 12 hours since the issues were first reported – issues which saw frustrated customers of O2 and other providers that use its network, such as Tesco Mobile and GiffGaff, lose their internet connection and ability to make calls and send text messages – the company declared at 9.30pm that 3G service should have been resumed.

The company said in a tweet at 9.26pm: “Our 3G data service is returning and we are confident it will be fully restored by 9.30pm this evening. Our technical teams will continue working hard with Ericsson engineers to restore 4G which will bring us back to full network service.”

It added in a statement on its website: “We will update our website and social media channels as soon as we have more information. We’re sorry for the loss of service our customers have experienced today.”

Earlier, a spokesperson for O2 took to Twitter to state: “One of our 3rd party suppliers has identified a software issue in their system. Our technical teams are working extremely hard to resolve this.”

It has been predicted that more than 30 million people were affected by yesterday’s issues.