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Telecommunications giant O2 has officially apologised to its customers for a sudden service failure that happened on Tuesday afternoon and left thousands of UK mobile handset owners without on-the-go online access or the ability to use messaging services.
Sorry about that. Image: O2.
While the outage did not affect Wi-Fi connectivity, leaving Net access unscathed, many handset users with monthly subscriptions – including those carrying the Apple iPhone – reported experiencing difficulties establishing an online connection and checking their e-mail accounts.
According to O2’s online apology, the network failed because of a glitch connected to a system used for assigning users a unique Internet protocol address (IP) whenever they log on to the O2 data network. Customers were still able to send and receive standard voice calls during the outage.
“From early afternoon yesterday, we suffered a fault with our data network. We have identified the cause of the fault, which relates to the allocation of IP addresses needed to establish a data collection,” said O2 via an official company statement.
“We have managed to restore data services to the vast majority of customers and are doing everything we can to ensure the few remaining customers are back online as soon as possible,” it added. “We are very sorry for the loss of data service to our customers.”
Presently the exclusive UK carrier for the hugely popular Apple iPhone, O2 supplies services to around 20.8 million customers in the United Kingdom.
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