A sign of things to come under our new political regime? No sooner had David Cameron entered Buckingham Palace than the UK’s biggest mobile phone network went off the grid.
My O2 signal went down immediately; five hours later, it still hasn’t returned and complaints are flooding Twitter. Smaller-scale problems were also reported on Vodafone (NYSE: VOD). Nevermind #nickcleggsfault, now the blame is
the new Prime Minister’s
O2 UK: “There’s an issue affecting our service in some of the UK. Sorry – our engineers are investigating and we’ll update you when we can…”
The Conservative leaders’ appointment as Prime Minister also apparently downed the membership sign-up on the Labour party’s website…
One Labour MP blamed a rush of voters keen to return Labour to power, though we haven’t verified this…
Tom Watson: “20 people a minute are currently trying to join the Labour Party online, hence this: www.labour.org.uk/join/“
O2 customers have experienced reception problems in the last year or two because its network has been unable to cope with rising data demands from iPhone users.
In December, O2’s CEO promised some network software modifications and 200 new base stations in London. But, on the biggest news day of the year, O2 fell over again – failing to bring its customers access to the new-government info on the move. The mobile news future wasn’t supposed to look like this.
There was even a snap Facebook group created…
In other Prime Minister news, an unfortunate accident from the website of Cameron’s local paper, Newsquest’s Witney Gazette – its front page lead image of Cameron’s inauguration is named “DisasterPic“.
Update: From O2’s forum:-
“There has been a network failure at a YATEs point where construction work has knocked off the power. The whole of the O2 network in the UK is having problems due to this…
“This outage is down to a major power failure which is affecting both cellular and data services… it is also affecting some elements of service provided by other operators. Unfortunately this is outwith O2s control, but as it’s a pretty major outage – I’m sure it’ll be fixed fairly quickly. It’s unfortunate it happened shortly before the call-centres were closing…”
Cameron, you’re off the hook.