17 May O2 network issues update

On 17 May there was issue on our network in parts of East London, North London, Kent and East Sussex. Here’s what happened and what we did to fix it.

07:50 update: We've now restored coverage to the affected areas.

What happened?
There was a theft and vandalism at one of our operations sites in East London and, as a result, customers in East London, North London, Kent and Sussex may have had experiencing problems making or receiving calls, texts or data, although at 17:30 full service was restored.

How did you fix this?
Our engineers attended the site, replaced the stolen equipment and repaired the vandalism. From 17:30 full service was restored.

How long did it take you?
Our engineers restored service at 17:30.

Can I get compensation?
We provide a quality and award-winning service to 22 million customers in the UK and spend £1m a day maintaining it. Mobile networks are not completely fault-free but incidents like the one we have experienced today are extremely rare. In light of this we do not, as a rule, offer compensation but customers can be reassured that full service has been restored as at 5.30pm last night.

When did this happen?
We discovered the problem in the early hours of this morning. Our engineers were on site as soon as possible. Once we discovered that there had been a theft, we made the site secure and informed the police.

How secure was the site?
This was a well organised theft which targeted this operations site. We have the full support of the police in investigating this incident.

Do you have backup plans?
We have extensive continuity plans which we brought into effect to restore service as quickly as we could.

What are you doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again?
It’s too early to draw any conclusions but we will be conducting a thorough investigation into how this happened.

I’m not in one of those areas but I’m having issues. What about me?
Please contact our Customer Service team who’ll be able to investigate what’s happening. You can also use our status checker at http://status.o2.co.uk.