O2 claim to have restored full 3G service to mobile network

Mobile phone company O2 - the latest victim of a technology system crash -  say they have fixed the problems with their service as the focus switches to compensation for affected customers.

Potentially hundred of thousands of customers were left without any service since yesterday afternoon.

O2 offered no further word on compensation after earlier saying that it was “focusing on getting full service resumed for all of our customers”.

The company said this morning that text message and mobile calling capabilities had been restored, and this afternoon claimed to have fixed the problems with their 3G services as well.

Some O2 customers faced a second day of disruption to their services despite engineers working through the night to try and resolve the problem.

Network issues began being reported yesterday afternoon.

It's not yet known how many O2 customers have been affected by the outage - but it is thought to be in the hundreds of thousands.

O2 said this afternoon: “Following previous updates, our tests now show that all our 2G and 3G services have been fully restored for affected customers.

If any customers are still having problems we recommend they turn their phone off and on again.

Once again, we are sorry."

Disgruntled and angry mobile phone users took to social networks this morning to express their anger over the outage.

Sean Foster (SeanFoster) tweeted: “Arrrrrrrghhhhh! My phone was fine all day yesterday and now after their failed overnight work o2 have screwed it!!”

Another Twitter user Leanna May (LeannaMai) said: “I can't bare this any longer!! THREE o2 contracts, NONE WORK. And I'm at home pregnant in agony! Great, who should I call? No one!!”

David de la Mere (dmeeno) also took to the micro blogging site, tweeting: “I probably shouldn't have been so smug about having an O2 signal yesterday. I don't have one now.”

High profile O2 users also took to twitter to complain - including former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and BBC presenter Huw Edwards.

Variations on the O2 theme had been trending on twitter since yesterday and 'My o2' was still doing so in London this morning.

The problems at 02 come against a backdrop of recent high-profile system failures.

A NatWest bank IT meltdown affected the banking services for customers and has left the company still clearing up the chaos caused by the failures three weeks later.

It is claimed the group has resolved 90% of the 21,000 issues that could not be resolved straight away.

In other technological failure news - there was a rare outage of the BBC news website yesterday after what the public service broadcaster described as a “major technical issue”.

The BBC has declined to provide further details but said an investigation has been launched.

Michael Allen, director of IT service management at technology performance company Compuware, said: “In recent weeks we've seen how technology problems can have significant problems on the everyday lives of millions of people. First we saw the problems at NatWest and RBS and now 02. Not being able to make a call will be as serious to many people as not being able to take cash out of the bank.

“Unfortunately, these problems will only continue to increase unless organisations take a fundamentally different approach to the way they manage the performance of the IT systems we rely on to go about our day to day lives.

“O2's ability to deliver a service to customers will rely on hundreds of different components, systems and applications working in harmony. This can make preventing these types of service disruptions difficult as well as finding the root cause time consuming.”