EE outage prompts customer outrage

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.

"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.