12 October
We’ve been updating this afternoon on twitter, facebook and our community about the fact around 10% of our customers have been unable to make or receive calls, or use data. The good news? The cause of the fault was identified and fixed this afternoon.
The bad news? Due to high phone use during the “rush hour” early evening period customers may experience intermittent performance as full service comes back for everyone. We would like to reassure those customers still affected that we are working as hard as we can to restore normal service to everyone.
Update – 13 October 09:26
We’re still monitoring the situation, but everything is fixed. If you’re still having problems, try turning your phone on and off. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.
Update – 15 October 19:00
Everyone with a phone impacted by Friday’s network issue and knock-on disruption should now have fully restored service. We’ll be updating later this week and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.
Q & A
Q. What has gone wrong?
A. One of our network nodes which help connect and manage traffic, failed at lunchtime today. This meant that a number of our customers have had difficulty connecting to our network to make calls or use data. A fix was found by 3.30pm and since then we have been reconnecting customers systematically. We are working as quickly as we can to restore service to everyone.
Q. Why are only some people impacted?
A. The fault was on one of several nodes that help connect and manage traffic on the network, which is why only 10% of customers have been affected. To fully restore service a backlog of traffic has had to be processed following the fix.
Q. When will service be fully restored?
A. Some people had their service restored from 3.30pm this afternoon when we began systematically reconnecting affected customers to the network. We are working as quickly as we can to restore service to all our customers.
Q. Is this the same fault as the one in July?
A. No, the cause was different. However, it has had a similar impact on our customers, albeit fewer of them.
Q. Why did you not have the necessary resilience?
A. We have extensive continuity plans which we brought into effect to restore service as quickly as we could. In this instance, a fix was found in three hours and we were able to start reconnecting customers systematically from 3.30pm this afternoon. We had to address the backlog of traffic to fully restore service.
Q. Will you be offering compensation?
A. While the network outage on the afternoon of October 12th was highly regrettable we will not be offering compensation in this case.
We are genuinely sorry that a number of customers had problems with their service on Friday afternoon and evening. The problem is now fixed and full service has been restored. We can assure all our customers that we are continually working to improve the consistency of service they get from our network.
Q. Can you be confident this won’t happen again?
A. We operate to the highest industry standards and using leading industry infrastructure. We will continue to challenge and assess what further steps we and our infrastructure partners can take to further improve our network performance.
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