O2 Network Fails

There I was with a working telephone and then I didn't have a network at all that my phone could connect to. Normally the village indoors is served by just one cell so I went outside to check if I could get any service at all from the other masks in the nearby town. I could see two O2 cells outside the house but none of them wanted anything to do with my phone at all. They did care they were meant to be delivering me a service. 

Then I realised the scale of the problem. There are 23 million people using the O2 network in the UK and despite O2 saying the number or people that are affect ran into thousands it seems that the number is much higher than that. Everyone I know on the network doesn't seem to have a connection to the network despite the fact that the cells themselves are clearly active and working.

It clearly looks like they have a data centre fault, maybe a server or a cluster of servers that hold the details that allow phones to connect to the network are down. Until it is fixed all of us that are suffering from the problem will continue to experience a lack of service. It all reminds me of the Blackberry problem that has resulted in the company losing customers. I just hope that O2 can sort it out quicker than they did.

UPDATE - Network Issues Resolved - 09:00 12th July 2012

It would seem that O2 now have the old 2G network up and running and they are reporting that the 3G network is slowly coming back online. This means that both texts and calls should now be working. It would seem that people might need to reset their phone and any users whose calls haven't returned after that should switching off their 3G until it comes back on line.

UPDATE - 23:00 12th July 2012

It turns out around 7 million people lost their connection to the O2 network probably due to some kind of major software fault that affect the entire network. Overall it took nearly 25 hours to restore the network fully to the customers affected. In reports in the press it has speculated that O2 are concentrating resources on the new G4 networks rather than the existing network and this might be part of the reason for the failure. My opinion is they haven't got the 3G network right so why the hell were they given an licence to run a 4G network.