O2 craps itself on national Blighty holiday as cabinet minister moans: 'Oi, sort it out!'

Updated O2 customers up and down the UK were left without access to the carrier's mobile service on Bank Holiday Monday, after its network buckled for five hours yesterday evening.

Even former Minster of Fun Sajid Javid – who is now Business Secretary under the new Tory government – griped about O2's pisspoor service.

He tweeted:

No signal @O2. Please sort it out

— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) May 25, 2015

O2 claimed just after 8pm last night that the network strife was "isolated" and said it was investigating reports of customers having only "intermittent access" to its service.

However, the number of complaints that flooded into micro-moaning site Twitter appeared to tell a different story. Plenty of folk strongly opposed O2's suggestion that its network hadn't crapped itself all over Blighty:

@O2 ISOLATED!!!!! Don't think so. INTERMITTENT!!!!! Don't think so

— chris brookes (@christtbiker) May 25, 2015

Meanwhile, GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile subscribers were also hit by the major outage as both of those services rely on O2's network.

Just before midnight on Monday, O2 claimed its service had fully recovered from the operator's massive, five-hour-long wobble that had made customers wail. It said:

Further to our previous messages where some customers experienced some problems accessing our network, we can confirm that service returned to normal at 23.35 hrs yesterday.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused to those customers affected and we will now begin a full investigation to identify the root cause.

However, O2 has not explained what caused its network to go titsup. The Register has asked for more details about this and we'll update the story if we do hear more.

Meanwhile, EE told el Reg that O2 had been "ballsy" with its claim that the outage had been "isolated".

When quizzed about whether EE could avoid such an embarrassing network collapse, the company's spokesman told us: "It would be rash to make those kind of promises, granted". ®

Update

O2 finally responded to our request for comment late on Tuesday afternoon. A spokesperson at the mobe operator told us:

The problem was caused by some network equipment that was temporarily unable to correctly process mobile phone traffic for some of our customers.

To be more specific, it was primarily the system that allows overseas customers to roam onto our network. The problem also impacted a second piece of equipment that allows calls, texts and data for UK customers to be managed correctly on our network.

Having identified this, we have now isolated the problem to prevent this from happening again.