Glitch leaves O2 iPhone users offline

December 22, 2009 | 14:09

Tags: #gprs #iphone #mms

Companies: #o2

Mobile provider O2 has admitted that a fault on its network prevented some iPhone users from connecting to the Internet for more than forty-eight hours.

As reported over on eWeek Europe, O2 - which, until very recently, held a monopoly position as the only provider of the iPhone in the UK thanks to a time-limited exclusivity deal with Apple - has admitted that an unknown number of its customers spent the last couple of days receiving the message "could not activate cellular data network" when they attempt to go online.

While the exact number of those affected is unknown - and according to O2 is not limited geographically - the issue is thought to have precented thousands of iPhone users from getting online, although voice calls and text messaging were fully operational throughout.

The issue has been ongoing for more than two days, with O2 first warning its customers that there might be an issue via its Twitter page - which is somewhat ironic, as iPhone users will require an active Internet connection to receive the update. Further explaining that the issue is the result of "a fault with the allocation of IP addresses," O2 promised to have the service back up "later tonight" on the 20th.

Sadly, this deadline was missed, with the service continuing to glitch well into this morning. At the time of writing, although Internet access had been restored to all users, O2's latest update on the issue admitted that "MMS and Visual Voicemail remain affected," while promising to work on the remaining problems "as a priority."

So far, there has been no word from O2 - bar the brief messages to its Twitter page - on the exact cause of the issue, nor on how the company plans to prevent outages such as this in the future.

Should O2 be ashamed that it took more than two days to fix the connectivity issues, or is that a good turnaround for a mobile network provider? Has your provider ever left you high and dry? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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