EE outage prompts customer outrage

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EE customers were left fuming last night after a network outage left many unable to send messages and make calls.

According to a report on downtime tracker downdetector.co.uk, the problems began after 6pm last night and persisted until the early hours of this morning. Although, at the time of writing, some users were still reporting issues on social networking site Twitter.

To help rectify this, EE has been urging users still experiencing problems to restart their handsets.

In terms of how widespread last night's outage was, downdetector.co.uk claimed the majority of outage reports appear to have originated within the M25, with users in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leicester, Liverpool and Edinburgh also reporting problems.

In a statement to IT Pro, an EE spokesperson said the issue has now been resolved, but stopped short of revealing exactly what caused it.

"Last night's technical issue that caused a small proportion of our customers to experience problems with their signal has been resolved and all customers are now receiving a normal service," they said.

"We apologies for the inconvenience caused to those customers affected."

Even so the downtime has prompted calls from customers for compensation on EE's support forum, while others also took issue with the time it took the operator to update them about the issue.

There seems to be some Gremlins in the system - we're aware of a network outage at the moment & working hard to fix. pic.twitter.com/MDQHO3vURYEE (@EE) March 19, 2014

"Poor customer service when I have to trawl round websites to find out about the problems. Then, as I read further, it appears that this is an ongoing problem," one poster wrote.

"This isn't what I signed up to when I moved across to EE. Your [EE] service needs to improve."

Networking outages are nothing new for mobile operators, as EE rivals O2 and Vodafone have all been hit with similar problems in the past.

Caroline Donnelly is the news and analysis editor of IT Pro and its sister site Cloud Pro, and covers general news, as well as the storage, security, public sector, cloud and Microsoft beats. Caroline has been a member of the IT Pro/Cloud Pro team since March 2012, and has previously worked as a reporter at several B2B publications, including UK channel magazine CRN, and as features writer for local weekly newspaper, The Slough and Windsor Observer. She studied Medical Biochemistry at the University of Leicester and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism at PMA Training in 2006.