O2, one of the UK’s leading mobile network service providers, has faced a backlash from its customers for failing to provide them with a data connection. The issue was reported to have been caused by a software fault identified by a third-party supplier.
The network provider worked with engineers from telecommunications company, Ericsson, to resolve the problem which had affected millions of its customers. “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 will continue to work with Ericsson through the night, who have assured us that a full service will be restored for customers by the morning. We fully appreciate it’s been a poor experience and we are really sorry,” said Mark Evans, CEO, Telefonica (O2) UK, during the incident.
Marielle Lindgren, CEO Ericsson UK and Ireland, also commented: “The cause of today’s network issue is in certain nodes in the core network resulting in network disturbances for a limited number of customers across the world, including in the UK. We have been working hard on resolving the UK data issue since early this morning. The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned. Our priority is to restore full data services on the network by tomorrow morning. Ericsson sincerely apologises to customers for the inconvenience caused.”
The issue has since been resolved after one day and O2 has assured its customers that its technical teams will be keeping a close eye on service performance and are conducting a full review into the cause.
Kevin Bocek, Vice President, Security Strategy and Threat Intelligence at Venafi, adds further comment: “The identity of machines makes the Internet run. Machine identities allow our mobile device, networks and computers trust each other,” he said.
“But they expire and networks, allocations and businesses fail. The O2 outage is just one more example of how important machine identities are to the economy and when they fail everything from buses, mobile devices and more fail.
“The O2 experience is the same that banks, airlines and the high street have all faced. It’s painful for millions and these problems are only getting worse as we depend more on cloud, mobile devices, AI and the coming arrival of 5G networks.”
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