Three’s customers were left in communication limbo last week after its mobile network went down.
As a result of the service disruption, Three has said it will look into customer compensation claims on a case-by-case basis.
The issues started the night of Wednesday 16 October, and continued into the following morning, when many of Three’s 10 million customers found they were unable to make calls, send texts or connect to the internet and access their data.
Three claimed to have rectified the issue by the next day, however they admitted that some customers were still having problems.
Three released a statement which said: “Following technical difficulties with our services across voice, text and data, some customers will be experiencing an intermittent service. Our engineers are working to fix the issue and the service is returning to normal, and we expect it to be resolved over the course of the day.
“We advise our customers to turn their phones off and on or turn airplane mode on and off, which may resolve the issue. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to our customers.”
Many of Three’s disgruntled users took to Twitter to voice their outrage, which led to #ThreeDown trending.
Customers who were affected by the outage are encouraged to get in touch with Three’s customer service team by dialling 333, where issues will be judged on a case by case basis and compensation may be offered.
Ernest Doku, mobiles expert at Uswitch.com, said: “Three’s 10 million customers will have been spitting feathers to find that the network was down. Users first reported problems just before midnight, so it shouldn’t have taken Three until almost nine o’clock the next morning to admit that it was ‘suffering technical difficulties.
“Three describes the problem as ‘intermittent’, meaning some users were able to use their phones as normal, while others reported being unable to make emergency calls.The network has yet to give customers any suggestion of when the problem will be fixed, leaving millions of people clueless about when they will be able to make calls, send texts, or get on the web from their mobiles.”
“So many of us are completely reliant on our mobile phones for our work and social lives, and Three customers need every reassurance that significant steps are being taken to address this major outage as soon as possible.”
“Customers should let Three know if they suffered a loss of service, and it is interesting to see that so many are already asking on Twitter what compensation they are entitled to. Mobile phone users pay their bills every month and expect a high standard of service in return. Being unable to use your network for extended periods is simply not good enough.”
