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...

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