O2 Network Hit By Vandalism

O2’s network covering customers in East London, North London, Kent and Sussex has been hit by problems after an incident of theft and vandalism that occurred on Monday night, the company said on Tuesday morning.

The incident occurred at a site in East London and was discovered in the early hours of Tuesday, the company said.

Theft and vandalism

“There has been theft and vandalism at one of our operations sites in East London and, as a result, customers in East London, North London, Kent and Sussex may be experiencing problems making or receiving calls, texts or data,” O2 said in a blog post early on Tuesday. “Our engineers are on site now working to replace the stolen equipment and repair the vandalism.”

The operator said it could not currently promise any time for the problem to be fixed – despite the existence of “extensive continuity plans”.

“The nature of this theft has prevented us from restoring service immediately but we expect to do so today,” O2 stated.

The company said it is working with police to investigate the incident.

“We discovered the problem in the early hours of this morning. Our engineers were on site as soon as possible. Once we discovered that there had been a theft, we made the site secure and informed the police,” O2 stated. “This was a well-organised theft which targeted this operations site.”

Operator Giff Gaff, which uses O2’s network, has posted maps (copied here) detailing the areas affected.

O2 has not yet revealed specifics on the incident, but theft of materials such as copper cabling has been an issue affecting network operators for some time. BT last year established a Metal Theft Taskforce (MTT), whose engineers are devoted to replacing stolen cables.

Vodafone break-in

In February Vodafone’s UK network was crippled by a break-in at one of its technical facilities, affecting millions of customers’ voice, data and text services.

Reports said the outage affected up to 3 million customers, and was caused by damage at the company’s Basingstoke technology centre – apparently the removal of servers handling network access. The network confirmed it was the Basingstoke centre, and faced heavy criticism for the failure – or absence – of any back-up for the facility.