UK mobile network O2 suffers outage, 25 million + customers are affected across Europe

[Master Disaster]

O2 are a massive mobile phone provider (what you'd call a carrier in the states) here in England and at around 6am this morning customers started reporting they'd lost data connection to the network.

Quote

O2 and its mobile network equipment supplier Ericsson have issued a joint apology to the millions of customers hit by disruption to its data services.

 

O2 chief executive Mark Evans said the firm would work with Ericsson through the night to resolve the problems.

 

Mr Evans said Ericsson had given assurances that a full service would be restored by Friday morning.

 

O2 are responsible for providing data services to many smaller providers here in England so the knock on affect of this outage has been pretty large.

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O2 has 25 million customers and also provides services for the Sky, Tesco, Giffgaff and Lycamobile networks, which have another seven million users.

 

Services such as bus timetable information have also been affected, while many businesses faced disruption.

 

In the joint statement, Mr Evans said: "I want to let our customers know how sorry I am for the impact our network data issue has had on them, and reassure them that our teams, together with Ericsson, are doing everything we can.

 

"We fully appreciate it's been a poor experience and we are really sorry."

 

Ericsson said there had been network disruption for customers in multiple countries.

The issue has been discovered and is apparently an expired security certificate which wasn't renewed.

Quote

Earlier Ericsson president Börje Ekholm gave more detail about the cause of the disruption. He said "an initial root cause analysis" had indicated that the "main issue was an expired certificate in the software versions installed with these customers".

 

He said "a complete and comprehensive root cause analysis" was in progress.

 

Most of the affected customers' network services had been successfully restored, he added.

Despite the network claiming otherwise many people are reported a loss in calling & texting functions as well.

Quote

Spain's Telefonica owns O2, which has the UK's second-largest mobile network after EE, which is now part of BT.

 

The company has said voice calls are not affected by the problem, but some O2 customers say they cannot make calls or send texts either.

 

The outage is having knock-on effects for other services that use the O2 network, including Transport for London's electronic timetable service at bus stops, which has stopped working.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46464730

 

Oops, I think whoever was supposed to renew that certificate is getting fired. This will cost them big time, public customers can expect a days worth of compensation but according to experts O2 could be liable for loss in business caused by this outage meaning any business customers could see huge compensation claims being paid out.

[yolosnail]

Good thing I left GiffGaff years ago when they got rid of the good plans. 

EE have been having problems recently as well, I've lost count of how many times I've lost 4G or even service all together

[AlTech]

Meanwhile on Three with perfectly working LTE .

 

Edit: Main reason why I didn't choose O2 when I started living in the UK is cos their pricing structures were kind of screwed up and not many people I know are on O2. 

 

A lot are on Vodafone or Three or EE.

[yolosnail]

9 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Meanwhile on Three with perfectly working LTE .

 

Edit: Main reason why I didn't choose O2 when I started living in the UK is cos their pricing structures were kind of screwed up and not many people I know are on O2. 

 

A lot are on Vodafone or Three or EE.

A lot of people are with O2 because of the iPhone exclusivity back in the day

[AlTech]

6 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

A lot of people are with O2 because of the iPhone exclusivity back in the day

Oh lol. The only people I know on O2 right now use Android devices.

[yolosnail]

1 minute ago, AluminiumTech said:

Oh lol. The only people I know on O2 right now use Android devices.

My Aunt joined O2 back when the iPhone came out (even though she worked for Orange at the time), and she only left them a month or two ago so I'd imagine a lot of their customers just haven't switched yet. Certainly nobody is joining because of their low prices!

 

I used to be on GiffGaff who O2 owns, but left when they hiked the prices up and switched to Three. I was with them a year or two before joining EE as they had a good deal on at the time. I then switched to ID mobile who runs on Three, then to Plusnet which runs on EE.

Where I live up north, O2 seems to have the worst signal, followed by Three, then Vodafone, with EE having the best. In fact, Three was the only network that had signal at our caravan in Kielder, they had full 3G signal where everyone else struggled to get one bar of 2G

[williamcll]

Just how bad is their routing to have a 25 million people outage?

[samcool55]

11 hours ago, williamcll said:

Just how bad is their routing to have a 25 million people outage?

They are talking about an expired certificate, you usually only have 1 of them and can easily be renewed without downtime.

The outage could be easily avoided but sometimes shit happens.

 

Like there is no reason to have more than 1 certificate because it either works, or it doesn't. As long as it's valid, it's fine. In the end it's just a file, you can't really go wrong with it. Expiring is basically the only thing that can go wrong with it and you know the expiry date when you get it so it's perfectly possible to renew in advance.