Three Network Crash Causes ‘Intermittent’ Outages

Mobile operator Three is currently battling to restore services to its 10 million mobile customers in the United Kingdom.

Since Wednesday night, millions of customers were left without a phone signal or access to data, and the problem is not resolved at the time of writing.

Indeed, even the Three website was down at the time of writing, and only displayed the following message “We’re doing some essential maintenance on the site, and we’ll be back up and running soon.”

Three outage

According to the fault tracking website Downdetector, the problems started on Wednesday night at 11:28pm BST.

Downdetector has received 8,893 reports of problems, from users in Manchester, London, Glasgow, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Bradford and Sheffield.

Three resorted to using Twitter to confirm the outage.

“We’re currently experiencing technical difficulties with voice, text and data, meaning some of you will be experiencing intermittent service. please accept our apologies, we’re sorting this out right now. check back here for updates,” the operator tweeted at 12.50am on Thursday.

There is no update as of 10am from the operator.

Three has suffered outages before, when in 2015 for example customers lost data access. The same happened in 2014 as well.

And other mobile operator also experience outages from time to time.

In December 2018, a significant outage affected 30 million customers of O2, as well as those using Giffgaff, Tesco Mobile and Sky Mobile.

How much do you know about UK mobile operators? Try our quiz!

Tom Jowitt

Tom Jowitt is a leading British tech freelancer and long standing contributor to Silicon UK. He is also a bit of a Lord of the Rings nut...

Recent Posts

Apple Sales Rise 6 Percent After Early iPhone 16 Demand

Fourth quarter results beat Wall Street expectations, as overall sales rise 6 percent, but EU…

18 hours ago

X’s Community Notes Fails To Stem US Election Misinformation – Report

Hate speech non-profit that defeated Elon Musk's lawsuit, warns X's Community Notes is failing to…

19 hours ago

Google Fined More Than World’s GDP By Russia

Good luck. Russia demands Google pay a fine worth more than the world's total GDP,…

19 hours ago

Spotify, Paramount Sign Up To Use Google Cloud ARM Chips

Google Cloud signs up Spotify, Paramount Global as early customers of its first ARM-based cloud…

2 days ago

Meta Warns Of Accelerating AI Infrastructure Costs

Facebook parent Meta warns of 'significant acceleration' in expenditures on AI infrastructure as revenue, profits…

2 days ago

AI Helps Boost Microsoft Cloud Revenues By 33 Percent

Microsoft says Azure cloud revenues up 33 percent for September quarter as capital expenditures surge…

2 days ago