Three UK suffers major network outage

Many Three UK users have reported they have no signal, with Three apparently struggling to get to the bottom of it.

Just as with competitor Vodafone, Three UK made the morning news for all the wrong reasons following widespread reports of no signal from its users. The PR challenge was made greater by the company’s apparent silence on the matter, with the Three UK support Twitter account silent until well into the morning and the web link apparently buckling under the strain of anxious punters.

The only statement we have received from Three so far merely reiterates that holding position. “Three is currently experiencing technical difficulties with our services across voice, text and data which means that some customers will be experiencing an intermittent service,” it said. “Our engineers are working on the issue now to fix the problem as soon as possible. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to our customers.”

At time of writing there had been no update, although were able to access the support site, which presented the following message: “Our services are coming back online. If you’re still having problems, please turn your device off and on again to get re-connected.” The information vacuum was filled, as ever, by online speculation, including the trending hashtag #threedown.

We have seen some speculation that this could be down to teething problems with Three’s shiny new cloud core, but who knows? Just as with Vodafone Three will presumably sort out the problem before long, but the lack of explanation for the outage is troubling and if it is anything to do with the new core this will be a good case study of self-healing networks and all the other clever stuff that is supposed to come with the move to the cloud.

UPDATE 14:45 17 Oct 19: Three UK contacted us to categorically deny these problems have anything to do with the new cloud core. They have yet to comment on what the cause was, however.