[HN Gopher] UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2...
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UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in
mass outage
Author : oger
Score : 172 points
Date : 2025-07-24 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.the-independent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.the-independent.com)
| jon-wood wrote:
| I see we're still using Down Detector as a source for stories,
| which may as well be called People Are Talking on Twitter
| Detector. It doesn't do anything smart, it's just looking for
| keywords on social media, sometimes by coincidence this indicates
| an actual outage.
| dave78 wrote:
| Yeah, it's far from ideal, but in my experience its accuracy is
| better than most anything else readily available, including the
| official status pages maintained by most tech companies.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Yeah, and not only do you get to see if it's down or not
| (reddit infamously always says it's up even when there are
| issues), but you also get to see the raw data of reports.
| Ofttimes I've seen the trend go up and realized it's a very
| recent issue - even _before_ downdetector itself recognizes
| it as such.
|
| Human reading > DD reading >> "All our services are
| operational" when they're absolutely f--ing not.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Do you have a better suggestion? This is the best we can get,
| without having a public protocol for asking any service, "are
| you alive?"
| avalys wrote:
| Actually it's quite smart! Probably the smartest possible
| solution to the problem they tried to solve.
|
| "Smart" doesn't have to mean complex and technically
| sophisticated.
| teeray wrote:
| Down Detector will be useful as long as marketing departments
| control official status pages.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| If it's stupid but it works it isn't stupid. Many S3 outages
| are on Down Detector minutes before the AWS status page reacts:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41770111
| nailer wrote:
| Was about to say the same. So many of my colleagues looki]
| for officially confirmed statuses if a cloud provider, AI,
| blockchain or github starts acting funny and troubleshooting
| problems thinking it's their own systems. My response is: did
| you check for people talking on X? About half an hour later
| there's an official incident.
| viraptor wrote:
| Or are there at all. AWS status page likes to be fully green,
| even during issues...
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| People submit reports through down detector.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Google can detect flu break-outs much faster than the CDC for
| example, because people tend to search for symptoms before they
| let anyone know officially, visit a doctor, etc.
| wut42 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Who downs detector the down detector? Or even better who is the
| redundancy for dd if the site is actually up?
| racedude wrote:
| Uh oh big broken now
| yabones wrote:
| 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...
| wut42 wrote:
| And Australia 2023 outage of Optus, also BGP related:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Optus_outage
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :-)
| signal11 wrote:
| Being able to release safely during the week is super
| important for eg financial services, for fairly obvious
| reasons.
|
| In trading and market making contexts for instance, we
| release 100s of times a day -- including Fridays. This
| includes bog-standard infra changes like roleswaps and
| server rebuilds. The releases that happen on weekends
| tend to be highly disruptive infra changes, eg unexpected
| changes to some kind of physical connectivity where we're
| not comfortable with carrying weekday risk.
|
| We didn't explicitly set to to optimise QoL for engineers
| (the real driver for safe intraday change was being
| responsive as a business) but not usually being on call
| on weekends was a big plus.
| atemerev wrote:
| Yes. It is either Friday evening or Sunday in finance.
| whycome wrote:
| I know one outcome of it was to ensure that they were
| equipped with SIMs for Competitor networks just in case
| dlenski wrote:
| You're saying that Rogers _personnel_ now have non-Rogers
| SIM cards?
| xp84 wrote:
| I mean, incredibly critical personnel probably should be!
| There may only be a few dozen such people, but I wouldn't
| want the added chaos caused in the event of a Rogers
| outage if I couldn't get in touch with the key decision
| makers and most critical operations engineers because of
| the very outage they're meant to fix. And in the e-sim
| era that is hopefully very cheap and without any real
| downsides.
| dlenski wrote:
| 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.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| When roaming, your home network is needed for routing
| incoming calls to you, and handling authenticating your
| device to the visited network.
| crinkly wrote:
| Sitting at a table in a restaurant in London with some family and
| O2, ER and Three are fine.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Stop looking at your phone.
| crinkly wrote:
| Everyone went for a piss.
| geocar wrote:
| At the same time?
| sitkack wrote:
| They are talking about the OP while doing coke.
| spauldo wrote:
| Your family doesn't? That's weird.
| crinkly wrote:
| Yes they are all female and they appear to attend the
| bathroom in large groups.
| aftbit wrote:
| Now we're all just taking the piss.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > 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/
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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.
| dlenski wrote:
| 45 minutes later, another reply here
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44674209) suggests that
| Vodafone and O2 _are_ indeed experiencing issues.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I _think_ O2 is OK. My phone company is not O2, but it uses
| their network.
| tim333 wrote:
| I had an annoying O2 fail on me incident at about 6pm.
| drrob wrote:
| I'm on Vodafone, I can confirm they're okay.
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| It's just inbound calls to EE numbers (so if you've ported in
| you're not affected)
| mjpa86 wrote:
| I'm on EE with a ported in number and didn't get a call I
| should have earlier...
| g_p wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Tis what I meant - I have an EE MVNO SIM but originally an O2
| number and I can recieve calls just fine.
| mmsc wrote:
| China watching with open eyes.
|
| This will happen the day that they try to take Taiwan, worldwide,
| in my opinion.
| whycome wrote:
| Gotta hold onto the 0day for that one.
| pmontra wrote:
| Only if they absolutely need it. Nobody would spoil an asset
| like that. Maybe they would turn off mobile in Taiwan if they
| control their network. I didn't check which technology provider
| they use.
| nailer wrote:
| I don't think it would permanently spoil anything. China
| would just stop the phone network from being used to
| coordinate a response.
| pmontra wrote:
| No mobile network can be an inconvenience but who has to
| respond will have the means to communicate no matter what.
| Furthermore every single common person will feel a personal
| level of danger and they won't simply shrug about the
| destiny of a remote island somewhere on the map.
| aftbit wrote:
| I do think there's a better than average chance that WW3 starts
| not with an open nuclear exchange as our parents imagined, but
| instead with a substantial cyberattack which shuts down power,
| water treatment, communications, hospitals, public
| transportation, etc. This might even be deniable / grey zone
| for a few hours or days while the belligerent parties use the
| chaos to accomplish some Blitzkrieg style attacks.
| hollerith wrote:
| If that were possible, then why didn't Russia, which might
| have the most experienced pool of cyber-attack skills in the
| world, do it to Ukraine?
| ifwinterco wrote:
| They did try, but ukraine were suspicious something was
| going to happen (massive army suddenly forming near their
| border) and they had spent time securing stuff
| cess11 wrote:
| They'd also done it on and off for like a decade already
| so everyone was used to it and had mitigations in place.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| it would get them nothing.
|
| they did attack satcom systems to the point of bricking
| them.
|
| what do you think would happen if you turn off critical
| infra for a country?
|
| mass civilian death/suffering. military likely hardly
| affected but extremely motivated...
|
| its counter productive.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's stage 2. Stage 1 is election fixing, subversion and
| capture of foreign governments through bribery and kompromat.
| messe wrote:
| Yeah that's why we're expecting stage 2 next.
| rwmj wrote:
| Why? They'll take down BT landlines in case I need to call my
| auntie and tell her about the news?
| exe34 wrote:
| tbh breaking public internet/phones will probably be done by
| a local government trying to do something nasty. Stop people
| coordinating and turning up places they might get in the way.
|
| I think my tin foil hat was askew. There. All better.
| 18172828286177 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They've probably let everyone know by SMS, we'll get the
| message when everything starts working again
| a2128 wrote:
| The on-call person couldn't get the call due to an outage :(
| gandalfian wrote:
| 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| 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?
| codedokode wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jibbit wrote:
| age verification starts tomorrow
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| 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.
| kerv wrote:
| are they powered by starlink?
| te_chris wrote:
| EE ok in Ldn
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Honestly I know this sound snarky but it's 100% true - Three has
| become so unbelievably bad in East London lately I'd struggle to
| know if it was affected by this outage or if it was business as
| usual for them. I could go on about how broken their billing and
| app and site were but meh... need to change provider.
| situationista wrote:
| Related to current Starlink outage? probably not, but interesting
| coincidence
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Is this voice only, data only, or voice and data?
|
| 2G,3G,4G,5G?
|
| For voice, is CS down, VoLTE down or both?
|
| Article is not clear on this, but I mainly see voice call
| complaints?
| tahoeskibum wrote:
| And now Starlink is down as well. I wonder if they are related.
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(page generated 2025-07-24 23:00 UTC)