O2 network goes down in London

MOBILE OPERATOR O2 has confirmed that its network went down for nearly an hour across East London earlier today.

O2 admitted that its network went down in parts of the East London and Essex area this morning. It said that the disruption was discovered at 10am and the service was restored at 10:50am.

The issue that affected both 2G and 3G services meant that "customers in these areas may have experienced difficulty in making or receiving mobile calls, texts or using data," an O2 spokesperson told The INQUIRER.

The cause of the problem was apparently down to "planned work designed to ensure the robustness of the network following theft and vandalism at a site in East London last month".

On the contrary, O2's online status page lists today's drop in service under a heading of "Unexpected Issues". The status page claims that the trouble lasted a total of 57 minutes.

Whilst users were unhappy, tweeting things like "Argh! O2 failing again! They've got a problem that means I can't make calls, or send texts. Brilliant", others were taking more drastic action, with one punter tweeting, "#o2 is dead once again! Cancelling my contract this weekend. Rather give my money to vodaphone for a HTC sensation."

According to numerous tweets a quick fix for the problem was to disable 3G data. But nevertheless service is back to normal now and O2 must be hoping to avoid giving customers reasons to jump ship with any further problems.

O2 issued an statement that said, "We apologise to those customers affected and we continue to monitor service from the site." µ