If you were one of the millions of customers affected by the crippling O2 network outage this week, at least you won’t have to pay for the privilege.
The network, which suffered major disruption throughout Thursday and into Friday, says it will be giving users up to two days credit on their accounts to compensate for the network fail.
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.
An O2 spokesman said: “We’re very sorry about yesterday’s data issue. We understand how important it is to stay connected, especially at this time of year.
“We’d once again like to thank our customers for their patience. We’re doing all we can to make sure this issue doesn’t happen again.”
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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
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.
As well as O2’s 25 million customers, the outage also affected MVNO networks like Sky Mobile and Giff Gaff, who piggyback on O2’s spectrum. Those companies will provide compensation to its users separately.
O2 customers getting 2 days free data whilst us @SkyMobile scum get 1 day #standard
— Dean Smith's C & B Army (@AVFC_Beefy) December 7, 2018
The compensation of two days mobile credit is unlikely to please users for whom the outage affected their ability to work or communicate with family.
Yesterday O2 attributed the problems to a software issue, while infrastructure firm Ericsson said an expired certificate was behind the outage.
In a tweet, O2 wrote: “One of our 3rd party suppliers has identified a software issue in their system. Our technical teams are working extremely hard to resolve this. We’d encourage you to use Wi-Fi wherever you can and we are really sorry.”
Are you still experiencing issues with the O2 network is is everything running smoothly now? Drop us a line @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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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.
