
O2 outage: 31m mobile customers unable to get online - Viperus
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customers-unable-to-get-online
======
verytrivial
I'm seeing references to something Ericsson contributes to their network. It
would very interesting to see what went wrong and in particular, what caused
the change or deployment to be "un-revertable". My money is on a cascade of
issues, some of which were latent and only triggered today.

This is, by far, the worst cell outage I've seen in the UK. There is _zero_
connectivity via O2 in e.g. London, data or otherwise.

[1] [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/o2-network-down-
ericss...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/o2-network-down-ericsson-
working-to-resolve-issue-as-millions-left-without-smartphone-data-
and-a4010496.html)

~~~
martinald
Due to an expired TLS cert: [https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-
releases/2018/12/update-on...](https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-
releases/2018/12/update-on-software-issue-impacting-certain-
customers?707191720)

~~~
noir_lord
I liked the "limited number of customers" yes that's true, it affect 2-3
companies, it's just that a single one of those companies had 32M customers.

Ouch.

------
dreen
[https://status.o2.co.uk/](https://status.o2.co.uk/)

> We believe other mobile operators around the world are also affected.

Anyone else affected?

~~~
otoburb
Ouch. Their status page seems to be overloaded, assuming that is the correct
URL.

~~~
bArray
Why do so many status pages seem to crash/incorrect report when the service
goes down?

Once you get on the page:

    
    
        We're really sorry but this system is currently
        experiencing some technical problems.
        Our engineers have been notified, so please check back
        later.

~~~
otoburb
Best practice is to host the status page on completely separate
infrastructure. This adds a lot of operational overhead often seen as
disproportionately low benefit relative to the ongoing effort to maintain,
until rare events like this actually happen.

~~~
Angostura
> Best practice is to host the status page on completely separate
> infrastructure.

Perhaps they have - and it's overloaded.

~~~
aarong11
Probably offset by the amount of people who can't access it due to their
internet not working haha

------
boyce
I thought initially it was a local thing like when Vodafone disappeared here
because a falcon made a nest on the transmitter

~~~
roliver
University of Southampton?

~~~
boyce
Yup. 2006-2012, still live in Highfield.

------
enlyth
I haven't had mobile internet since yesterday evening on O2, and I travel to
London for work.

Luckily, there's WiFi at home, at work, and on the trains, so it's not really
affecting me too much, but I'd really like to see the postmortem of such a
huge outage.

