Three UK goes TITSUP*: Down and out for 10 hours and counting Three UK has suffered a nine-hour outage and counting, affecting 3G and 4G calls across the entire British Isles. The mobile network operator, which boasts 11.7 million customers, has been down since around 11 last night judging by the volumes of angry tweets directed at it. A quick squint at Down Detector shows thousands of …
>Other offline apps are available
But only if you have Internet connectivity to be able to download that offline app...
In these circumstances the best offline app is one of the paper versions, combined with setting the car radio to pick up traffic reports - its what we did a little over 10 years ago...
Down ere in rural west hampshire, it has been fine all day. Reading this site is the first I've heard about it. There again, in this backwater, we are never anywhere near the first to hear about anything. The POTS network is a bit of wet string and two tin cans on days like this (aka chucking it down)
My Three HomeFi service went offline at 0:45 (ish) this morning and was still down when I went to work at 8:30 this morning.
Since 9:15 I've been able to connect to it by VPN so it looks like it's up, but there is still no signal on my iPad where I work.
Can only assume they're either bringing it up in a phased way or by APN or something like that?
Dropped completely about 10:30 - 11pm last night.
By 5am, mobile data was working for a few (<5) minutes at time.
DNS was not working, i.e. the route pushed didn't container nameservers.
By 11am, mobile data has been not working for about 12 hrs.
11:10am mobile data seems to be back DNS seems fine again.
Working perfectly for me in Edinburgh, in fact dare I say better than usual, where my office usually only has an iffy 1 bar signal indoors, but today has 2 or 3?! (Although maybe that could be If there is less load on the nearest mast than usual if other people are knocked out?)
I got a text last week saying that they were going to be carrying out work in the Bishopton area this week (near my office outside Glasgow), and hoped to be finished by the 16th.
so, I had worse than usual service yesterday - and no service at all today. no text, voice or data.
their website is still down - and I can't use most of the social media sites from my work computer (El Reg doesn't count).
I think the time may have come to move to another provider (not that most of them are any better)
Three have been having network issues on and off for some months now in various parts of the country, I wonder if all this is related?
While their tarrifs have been great value for my useage, the reliability issues have really started to compound their general lack of signal whenever I'm anywhere vaguely remote (while Voda seems to have no problems). Think I might be looking for a new provider in the not too distant future.
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What most people don't realise is that Three have 2 main core networks the Legacy 3G/4G and the new 4G/5G cloud network. Obviously running 2 networks together is bound to suffer some teething problems.
Offshoring of 90% of Service Desk and Ops Support jobs and ongoing reduction of UK back office Tech Support staff by 50% doesn't help the situation either,
..but it's only £15.37 a month on my contract with 30GB of data, unlimited text and voice (I assume they have a fare use clause in that). But their signal strength is shockingly shit.
Lucky I was asleep during the outage and only noticed this morning but didn't need the phone.
SMARTY doesn't offer the same "roam like home" arrangement that Three does in many other countries around the world beyond the EU, which is very useful and could be a deal-breaker for some.
(I briefly ported to SMARTY and then later back to Three again as Three's webshite wouldn't let me upgrade to a (much) better value "new customer" tariff (yeah, way to reward long-term loyalty, guys). The Three website could really do with a full rebuild, it's clunky as hell and not entirely mobile-friendly (duh).)
(Remember, if you are fed up with your mobile network and are out of contract, you can now port hassle-free without having to endure helpline queues and drones, just by texting: PAC 65075.)
Had a failure at about 6:45 this morning, got the router rebooted half an hour ago and it's back and running.
Have to say I've been very happy with the signal, and the cost, of the service.
(Uptime on the systems behind it indicate that it was just a network access failure at the router - but I couldn't get it to reconnect without a reboot).
the Single Point of Failure?
There was an item on You and Yours (R4, lunchtime) that included people for whom life appeared to have stopped completely; can'y pay for car parking, can't buy a coffee and so on.
To those who are totally reliant on their smartfones for "everything" I would point out that you have willingly and wilfully introduced a Single Point of Failure into your everyday lives and you might usefully consider a small change in methodology to circumvent this. Actually having some cash in your pockets might be a good start.
Single points of failure are a designers' and engineers' nightmare and they take the trouble to try to ensure that they don't build any in to whatever they are building. Is there any point if end users are going to ignore the possibilities of failure and engineer their lives so that a single failure that bring life to a halt?
Try a bit of "mode diversity".
You could say the same about almost every part of modern life. For example if you need a car to get to work and it breaks, you have a single point of failure. If you need money for food and your bank's systems stop working so you can't get paid, you have a single point of failure.
The point is we pay these companies to remove that risk, in the same way we have breakdown cover for our car. When they fail to implement redundancy themselves they have failed in their core duty.
When a moble phone network goes down people can die due to not being able to call for help. This is serious and Three should be facing the stiffest penalties any company serving the pubic could face as well as explaining exactly how they could allow an entire network to fail, presumably due to their own single point of failure or cascade failure.
Actually, don't most ppl get courtesy cars (and bicycles - when your main mode is a bike obvs!) in their road side assistance service or insurance?
Same thing goes for building insurance in that they will house you if there is a flood etc.
I guess the point is that some ppl don't consider the possibility so don't arrange any cover for it.
I just have a PAYG Vodafone second SIM for just for this situation and to cover for network dead spots as a backup.
I have "call forwarding on not available" setup pointing to my other SIM. Texts are not really a problem now with Whats App and other OTT messaging services.
Noticed this morning that my mobile was displaying GiffGaff instead of Three meaning that it had switched over to my secondary sim.
a quick tap of restart reconnected the phone to three.
luckily it doesn't matter which network I am connected with as nobody has the real numbers for the sim's, everyone has what appears to be a mobile No but is really just a sip number.
The network issues are annoying granted, but possibly not as important as being directly logged into someone else account when hitting the My3 URL last night at about 19.50 and being able to browse all their call logs/billing details.
Appears remarkably reminiscent of: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/21/three_admits_to_data_breach/
So far, no response as of yet on Twitter from Three Support on that one...
I have been getting at least 2 days a week the last month or more with most of the day no connection. This last week I am using my phone mobile data from Tesco, as 3 will not connect me. My mac constantly keeps saying connection to 3 network lost, and it's never just a few minutes or an hour or so.
We are talking give up and maybe you might get lucky next day type connection. And I have to pay £35 a month for that so called unlimited usage.
They can see and proove my connection is NOT so. And I'm talking use of a 3G dongle here, not even 4 or 5G but pittiful 3G, and they can't even get that right, but keen to take my precious money each month for the poor service.
Annoying, but not an exceptional approach to communication these days. Governments around the world are now posting diplomatic (and not so diplomatic) messages on Twitter as their sole means of dissemination. Not only are these often ill-considered sound bites unseen by all but the twitterati, but they can start wars.
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