O2 has started contacting its customers via text, to apologise for last week’s major outage.
The mobile operator’s network suffered major disruption throughout Thursday and into Friday, and the company says it will give users up to two days of credit on their accounts as an apology.
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Trusted Reviews‘ Computing Editor Tom Newton, who’s an O2 customer, received a text message today, reading: “We’re very sorry for Thursday’s network issues. We understand how important it is to stay connected, especially at this time of year.
“You’ll receive a credit for two days of your monthly airtime subscription charges by the end of January. We’re doing all we can to make sure this issue doesn’t happen again.”
O2 says its 3G services were back in action by 9:30pm on Thursday evening, while it wasn’t until 5:30am on Friday before 4G connectivity was restored.
The two days of credit will hit Pay Monthly, small business and mobile broadband customers’ accounts by the end of January, while pay-as-you-go users will get an additional 10% of credit next time they top up.
Our 4G network was restored earlier this morning. Our technical teams will continue to monitor service performance closely and we're starting the full review to understand what happened. We are really sorry for the issues yesterday.
— O2 in the UK (@O2) December 7, 2018
As well as O2’s 25 million customers, the outage also affected MVNO networks like giffgaff, Sky Mobile and Tesco Mobile, which all piggyback on O2’s spectrum.
Those companies will provide (or have already provided) compensation to its users separately. See below for details:
The mobile data outage that affected our giffgaff members has now been resolved. We're sorry for the problems you experienced, here's a full update from us. pic.twitter.com/HrKUXlT959
— giffgaff | The mobile network run by you (@giffgaff) December 7, 2018
Resolved: Sky Mobile – We’re really sorry for the issues you experienced on Sky Mobile yesterday. We’re giving you a day of free unlimited UK data this Saturday 8th of Dec, so you can catch up on all the things you’ve missed. You don’t need to do a thing.
— Sky Help Team (@SkyHelpTeam) December 7, 2018
To say sorry for any inconvenience caused by the network issue on Thursday 6 December, we will be offering all our customers a 2GB data bundle.
More information on this will be shared with our customers directly.— Tesco Mobile (@tescomobile) December 7, 2018
A quick look on Twitter shows that quite a lot of Sky Mobile customers feel a little short-changed…
Were you affected by the outage? Are you satisfied with the compensation package? Drop us a line @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
