On Thursday 6^th December, 2018, I realized how dependent I was on my mobile phone having an internet connection. That particular day, I was out and about away from Wi-Fi networks. The first time I noticed I had no connectivity was when I used my phone to check if my train was on time.

As I got close to London, I realized I was not the only person who did not have data services on their devices, as I overheard a few people commenting on no connectivity.

During the day, I found I wasn’t able to communicate with my emails, WhatsApp and other services, which depended on having 3G or 4G connectivity. I felt isolated and cut off. Only when I found a coffee shop and connected to Wi-Fi did my phone spring to life with lots of push notifications, messages and emails.

It’s around that time that I learned the O2’s 4G network had gone offline earlier in the day.

Although this event did not significantly affect my life that day, I wondered what impact the outage had on the millions of other people who were also on the same mobile phone network and the networks of affiliates, such as Giffgaff, Tesco Mobile and Lycamobile. There are surely organizations like emergency services that are surely dependent on constant service from their mobile provider.

I know that transportation for London’s electronic timetable services at bus stops stopped working; they were reliant on the network at the time of the service interruption. And as taxi firms use the network to authorize card payments, these companies might have lost fares.

This outage didn’t just impact UK customers, either. SoftBank in Japan was affected, and it’s believed other mobile operators around the globe also experienced some downtime..

O2 and news agencies did (Read more...)