UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
110 comments
·July 24, 2025amiga386
dlenski
45 minutes later, another reply here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44674209) suggests that Vodafone and O2 are indeed experiencing issues.
doubled112
When this happens in Canada (usually a Rogers outage), the other networks seem to have a hard time dealing with the extra load.
wkat4242
Only for roaming customers though. Here in Europe a customer in their home country can only use their home network unless they're calling emergency services. Only when roaming multiple options would be available.
So I wouldn't expect all that much extra load really.
wdb
Never have signal with EE at home barely 1 bar. It's ridiculous and I don't live in a flat or something.
drrob
I'm on Vodafone, I can confirm they're okay.
goodcanadian
I think O2 is OK. My phone company is not O2, but it uses their network.
tim333
I had an annoying O2 fail on me incident at about 6pm.
alephnerd
> O2: Unknown
Isn't that normal for O2? /s
wkat4242
So it's like three is in Ireland :)
alephnerd
At least you can drown your network sorrows in (relatively) affordable pints of Guinness and the healthy craft beer scene.
Separate note, but I am astonished by how expensive London is - I can pay engineers Bangalore level salaries but they have to deal with Chicago level CoL.
yabones
I wonder if it will be the same cause as the big Rogers outage in '22, a good old fashioned BGP botch.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/rogers-commun...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
Scoundreller
Diff with Rogers is that they took out their entire network: cellular, home/biz internet, home phone, corporate circuits (including MPLS links), most cable TV, a bunch of their broadcast radio (AM/FM) network just dead dead dead.
Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because the device made just enough of a handshake to try and fail on the Rogers network. A flaw in GSM I reckon.
Apparently the workaround was to remove/disable your SIM and hope another network has a stronger signal.
Oh, and the CTO was on holiday and had no idea for a while because… their phone was on roaming with Rogers and therefore dead.
I wonder if Rogers still does planned-in-advance multi-stage potentially-enterprise-breaking updates on Fridays
ecshafer
In a financial company I worked at we would do some of the biggest, riskiest changes at 5pm on a Friday (or Saturday evening if we were worried about impacting international trades). The logic being that we would have the most time to fix things before markets open monday.
NikolaNovak
Our release window is Saturday morning. All the support people are on, most users are not, gives us 36hrs. We absolutely do not release during week if we can help it. But we are traditional ERP application so pretty much everything we do is contrary to the HN/modern zeitgeist :-)
Scoundreller
Well this was like 6AM Friday Eastern time, soooo…
atemerev
Yes. It is either Friday evening or Sunday in finance.
dlenski
The '22 Rogers outage, hah. As I recall it didn't affect me at all since I was at home and work in Vancouver all day… but it was a great excuse for not responding to workplace on-call messages which I got in the evening
> Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because the device made just enough of a handshake to try and fail on the Rogers network. A flaw in GSM I reckon.
Didn't know that part, amazing.
It sounds kind of like connecting to a WiFi access point which has a broken/non-working uplink to the Internet. Modern smartphones pretty much automatically detect and avoid such APs, and indeed the whole SSID if they need to, but it sounds like the stuck-in-1985 2G baseband layer has no equivalent connectivity check.
486sx33
[dead]
whycome
I know one outcome of it was to ensure that they were equipped with SIMs for Competitor networks just in case
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dlenski
You're saying that Rogers personnel now have non-Rogers SIM cards?
addandsubtract
> their phone was on roaming with Rogers and therefore dead
I thought your phone uses all available networks (ie the strongest one) while roaming. Is that not the case?
g_p
When roaming, your home network is needed for routing incoming calls to you, and handling authenticating your device to the visited network.
wut42
And Australia 2023 outage of Optus, also BGP related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Optus_outage
ivan_gammel
Reminds me of recent outages in Russia due to buggy rollouts of Great Russian Firewall aka Sovereign Internet. Were there any state-level infrastructure updates planned recently?
jibbit
age verification starts tomorrow
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codedokode
We also have mobile internet disabled/throttled sometimes when there are drone attacks or large international forums. Weak-minded people with Internet dependency like to complain about this online as if their online game is more important than an international forum.
beagle3
Serious question: who gets to decide that some international forum is more important than residents’ use? - be it games, video calls, or whatever else.
codedokode
The government has an authority to decide, according to the laws? By the way they also often block roads for security of important foreign guests and cause lot of traffic jams.
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situationista
Related to current Starlink outage? probably not, but interesting coincidence
webprofusion
Thought that as well.
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rwmj
My BT landline doesn't even have a dial tone at the moment, which is a new one. Internet via Openreach (as the fibre provider) is OK.
18172828286177
It’s weird to me that the providers aren’t communicating to customers about this. What if you were waiting for a call from a doctor, or similar?
369548684892826
They've probably let everyone know by SMS, we'll get the message when everything starts working again
Marsymars
Seems to be the norm, unfortunately. I have a day’s worth of emails that were never delivered a few weeks ago due to an issue with Apple’s Hide My Email service, and AFAIK there hasn’t been any statement from Apple on the matter.
486sx33
[dead]
a2128
The on-call person couldn't get the call due to an outage :(
AndrewThrowaway
But the network is not working!
gandalfian
Data is working on Vodafone mvno. Can't call Out or text, Can't make calls On o2 or EE either. Edit EE working. Edit all mobiles now seem to be working OK.
MattPalmer1086
I haven't noticed anything today and heard no news about it. Must only affect some parts of the network.
Posting this from a phone on the Three network.
jonathantf2
It's just inbound calls to EE numbers (so if you've ported in you're not affected)
g_p
Even with a ported number, inbound call routing still heavily relies on the "number range" owner to direct the incoming call to the correct network.
If the original number range owner has their subscriber database go down, they can't do the lookup for the network to direct the incoming call towards, so it can cause disruption. The same is true if the incoming signalling endpoints are unavailable, as the incoming call requests won't be responded to.
jonathantf2
Tis what I meant - I have an EE MVNO SIM but originally an O2 number and I can recieve calls just fine.
mjpa86
I'm on EE with a ported in number and didn't get a call I should have earlier...
chmod775
> A map showing reports of EE outage reports made to DownDetector suggests that those in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow are the worst affected.
No. Those are the most densely populated areas of the UK - obviously they appear as bright red spots on the map.
What you have is essentially a population map: https://xkcd.com/1138/
crinkly
Sitting at a table in a restaurant in London with some family and O2, ER and Three are fine.
wut42
Another Down Detector bullshit article.... it's getting incredibly tiring. Every time a provider (Phone, Internet or even cloud services) suffer issues ALL of them are reported as down.
raverbashing
Who downs detector the down detector? Or even better who is the redundancy for dd if the site is actually up?
racedude
Uh oh big broken now
BT, EE: Yes. Three, Vodafone: No. O2: Unknown.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvmvqrnq7go
> A spokesperson from BT, which owns EE, apologised and said the firm was "currently addressing an issue impacting our services".
> Vodafone and Three have confirmed to the BBC they do not have network issues.