O2 has assured customers its service is back to normal after being bombarded with complaints about reception outages in several parts of the UK.
The mobile phone company apologised after people in areas including London, Manchester, Glasgow and parts of Northern Ireland lost signal and were unable to make or receive calls.
The business secretary was among those expressing frustration on Twitter. Sajid Javid tweeted: “No signal O2. Please sort it out,” as annoyed customers said that they had had no service for up to five hours.
A spokesman for O2 said the service had returned to normal at 23:35 BST on Monday. “We apologise for any inconvenience caused to those customers affected and we will now begin a full investigation to identify the root cause,” he added.
As reports of people losing their phone signal reached O2, the phone provider advised customers to reboot their handsets. It later said it was aware of “some issues” and “isolated instances”.
In a series of tweets, O2 told customers: “We’re working flat out (and upright too) to get these fixed. Sorry for the problems” and “Sorry for all the effort you’ve had to put in Ems. We’re making sure our engineers put in even more to fix the problems!”
O2 later insisted its engineers were “beavering away and working to fix ASAP”. It tweeted: “We’re aware of isolated instances where some customers have intermittent access to our service. We’re investigating and will update ASAP.”
