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UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
- jonathantf2 1y agoIt's just inbound calls to EE numbers (so if you've ported in you're not affected)
- mjpa86 1y agoI'm on EE with a ported in number and didn't get a call I should have earlier...
- g_p 1y agoEven with a ported number, inbound call routing still heavily relies on the "number range" owner to direct the incoming call to the correct network. If the original number range owner has their subscriber database go down, they can't do the lookup for the network to direct the incoming call towards, so it can cause disruption. The same is true if the incoming signalling endpoints are unavailable, as the incoming call requests won't be responded to.
- jonathantf2 1y agoTis what I meant - I have an EE MVNO SIM but originally an O2 number and I can recieve calls just fine.
- jon-wood 1y agoI see we’re still using Down Detector as a source for stories, which may as well be called People Are Talking on Twitter Detector. It doesn’t do anything smart, it’s just looking for keywords on social media, sometimes by coincidence this indicates an actual outage.
- dave78 1y agoYeah, it's far from ideal, but in my experience its accuracy is better than most anything else readily available, including the official status pages maintained by most tech companies.
- user_7832 1y agoYeah, and not only do you get to see if it's down or not (reddit infamously always says it's up even when there are issues), but you also get to see the raw data of reports. Ofttimes I've seen the trend go up and realized it's a very recent issue - even before downdetector itself recognizes it as such. Human reading > DD reading >> "All our services are operational" when they're absolutely f--ing not.
- jon-wood 1y agoIt's fine in simpler cases but as we're seeing here, is absolutely useless at providing information on failures in complex systems. It appears that it was one network suffering issues but this was then reported as "EVERY MOBILE NETWORK IN THE UK IS DOWN" because people just go "I tried to make a call and it didn't connect". That could be anything from a single cell tower being hit by a truck to a nationwide power outage.
- whalesalad 1y agoDo you have a better suggestion? This is the best we can get, without having a public protocol for asking any service, "are you alive?"
- avalys 1y agoActually it’s quite smart! Probably the smartest possible solution to the problem they tried to solve. “Smart” doesn’t have to mean complex and technically sophisticated.
- teeray 1y agoDown Detector will be useful as long as marketing departments control official status pages.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoIf it's stupid but it works it isn't stupid. Many S3 outages are on Down Detector minutes before the AWS status page reacts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41770111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41770111
- nailer 1y agoWas about to say the same. So many of my colleagues looki] for officially confirmed statuses if a cloud provider, AI, blockchain or github starts acting funny and troubleshooting problems thinking it's their own systems. My response is: did you check for people talking on X? About half an hour later there's an official incident.
- viraptor 1y agoOr are there at all. AWS status page likes to be fully green, even during issues...
- ElijahLynn 1y agoPeople submit reports through down detector.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoGoogle can detect flu break-outs much faster than the CDC for example, because people tend to search for symptoms before they let anyone know officially, visit a doctor, etc.
- wut42 1y agoAnother Down Detector bullshit article.... it's getting incredibly tiring. Every time a provider (Phone, Internet or even cloud services) suffer issues ALL of them are reported as down.
- raverbashing 1y agoWho downs detector the down detector? Or even better who is the redundancy for dd if the site is actually up?
- racedude 1y agoUh oh big broken now
- yabones 1y agoI wonder if it will be the same cause as the big Rogers outage in '22, a good old fashioned BGP botch. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/rogers-communications-services-down-thousands-users-downdetector-2022-07-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/rogers-commun... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_outage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
- wut42 1y agoAnd Australia 2023 outage of Optus, also BGP related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Optus_outage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Optus_outage
- Scoundreller 1y agoDiff with Rogers is that they took out their entire network: cellular, home/biz internet, home phone, corporate circuits (including MPLS links), most cable TV, a bunch of their broadcast radio (AM/FM) network just dead dead dead. Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because the device made just enough of a handshake to try and fail on the Rogers network. A flaw in GSM I reckon. Apparently the workaround was to remove/disable your SIM and hope another network has a stronger signal. Oh, and the CTO was on holiday and had no idea for a while because… their phone was on roaming with Rogers and therefore dead. I wonder if Rogers still does planned-in-advance multi-stage potentially-enterprise-breaking updates on Fridays
- ecshafer 1y agoIn a financial company I worked at we would do some of the biggest, riskiest changes at 5pm on a Friday (or Saturday evening if we were worried about impacting international trades). The logic being that we would have the most time to fix things before markets open monday.
- NikolaNovak 1y agoOur release window is Saturday morning. All the support people are on, most users are not, gives us 36hrs. We absolutely do not release during week if we can help it. But we are traditional ERP application so pretty much everything we do is contrary to the HN/modern zeitgeist :-)
- crinkly 1y agoSitting at a table in a restaurant in London with some family and O2, ER and Three are fine.
- fecal_henge 1y agoStop looking at your phone.
- amiga386 1y agoBT, EE: Yes. Three, Vodafone: No. O2: Unknown. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvmvqrnq7go https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvmvqrnq7go > A spokesperson from BT, which owns EE, apologised and said the firm was "currently addressing an issue impacting our services". > Vodafone and Three have confirmed to the BBC they do not have network issues.
- dlenski 1y ago45 minutes later, another reply here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44674209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44674209) suggests that Vodafone and O2 are indeed experiencing issues.
- doubled112 1y agoWhen this happens in Canada (usually a Rogers outage), the other networks seem to have a hard time dealing with the extra load.
- wkat4242 1y agoOnly for roaming customers though. Here in Europe a customer in their home country can only use their home network unless they're calling emergency services. Only when roaming multiple options would be available. So I wouldn't expect all that much extra load really.
- goodcanadian 1y agoI think O2 is OK. My phone company is not O2, but it uses their network.
- tim333 1y agoI had an annoying O2 fail on me incident at about 6pm.
- drrob 1y agoI'm on Vodafone, I can confirm they're okay.
- chmod775 1y ago> A map showing reports of EE outage reports made to DownDetector suggests that those in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow are the worst affected. No. Those are the most densely populated areas of the UK - obviously they appear as bright red spots on the map. What you have is essentially a population map: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- mmsc 1y agoChina watching with open eyes. This will happen the day that they try to take Taiwan, worldwide, in my opinion.
- whycome 1y agoGotta hold onto the 0day for that one.
- pmontra 1y agoOnly if they absolutely need it. Nobody would spoil an asset like that. Maybe they would turn off mobile in Taiwan if they control their network. I didn't check which technology provider they use.
- nailer 1y agoI don't think it would permanently spoil anything. China would just stop the phone network from being used to coordinate a response.
- pmontra 1y agoNo mobile network can be an inconvenience but who has to respond will have the means to communicate no matter what. Furthermore every single common person will feel a personal level of danger and they won't simply shrug about the destiny of a remote island somewhere on the map.
- nailer 1y agoThe people we are talking about live in Taiwan, so Taiwan is not a remote island for them.
- aftbit 1y agoI do think there's a better than average chance that WW3 starts not with an open nuclear exchange as our parents imagined, but instead with a substantial cyberattack which shuts down power, water treatment, communications, hospitals, public transportation, etc. This might even be deniable / grey zone for a few hours or days while the belligerent parties use the chaos to accomplish some Blitzkrieg style attacks.
- 18172828286177 1y agoIt’s weird to me that the providers aren’t communicating to customers about this. What if you were waiting for a call from a doctor, or similar?
- 369548684892826 1y agoThey've probably let everyone know by SMS, we'll get the message when everything starts working again
- a2128 1y agoThe on-call person couldn't get the call due to an outage :(
- Marsymars 1y agoSeems to be the norm, unfortunately. I have a day’s worth of emails that were never delivered a few weeks ago due to an issue with Apple’s Hide My Email service, and AFAIK there hasn’t been any statement from Apple on the matter.
- 486sx33 1y ago[dead]
- AndrewThrowaway 1y agoBut the network is not working!
- gandalfian 1y agoData is working on Vodafone mvno. Can't call Out or text, Can't make calls On o2 or EE either. Edit EE working. Edit all mobiles now seem to be working OK.
- rwmj 1y agoMy BT landline doesn't even have a dial tone at the moment, which is a new one. Internet via Openreach (as the fibre provider) is OK.
- ivan_gammel 1y agoReminds me of recent outages in Russia due to buggy rollouts of Great Russian Firewall aka Sovereign Internet. Were there any state-level infrastructure updates planned recently?
- codedokode 1y agoWe also have mobile internet disabled/throttled sometimes when there are drone attacks or large international forums. Weak-minded people with Internet dependency like to complain about this online as if their online game is more important than an international forum.
- beagle3 1y agoSerious question: who gets to decide that some international forum is more important than residents’ use? - be it games, video calls, or whatever else.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- codedokode 1y agoThe government has an authority to decide, according to the laws? By the way they also often block roads for security of important foreign guests and cause lot of traffic jams.
- beagle3 1y agoWell, yes. It’s the same kind of issue. AFAIK, these things are decided opaquely and do not follow any formal rules - which would make them ripe for abuse. The GGP seemed to be ridiculing “those gamers who think their ping is more inportant”, but there is no way for a person to tell if the network limits, or road blocks for that matter, are reasonable or an instance of corruption.
- abdulhaq 1y agothey also restrict major roads like the M4 for the benefit of the Olympic committee
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoI haven't noticed anything today and heard no news about it. Must only affect some parts of the network. Posting this from a phone on the Three network.
- kerv 1y agoare they powered by starlink?
- te_chris 1y agoEE ok in Ldn
- andy_ppp 1y agoHonestly I know this sound snarky but it’s 100% true - Three has become so unbelievably bad in East London lately I’d struggle to know if it was affected by this outage or if it was business as usual for them. I could go on about how broken their billing and app and site were but meh… need to change provider.
- macintux 1y agoYou reminded me that a couple of jobs ago (I tend to stay with jobs for a long time) we discovered that a local paging tower had failed because one of our techs could not receive pages at home. Our assumption was that we were basically the last people using their service in the area.
- muziq 1y agoThree has been fucked for years on 5G: https://community.three.co.uk/t5/Broadband/Intermittent-connection-issues-loading-changing-site-secure-connection-failed-site-can-t-be-reached/m-p/53544/emcs_t/S2h8ZW1haWx8dG9waWNfc3Vic2NyaXB0aW9ufE1ESEtGSkVWOFYzNU9JfDUzNTQ0fFNVQlNDUklQVElPTlN8aEs#M9340 https://community.three.co.uk/t5/Broadband/Intermittent-conn...
- situationista 1y agoRelated to current Starlink outage? probably not, but interesting coincidence
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- webprofusion 1y agoThought that as well.
- heraldgeezer 1y agoIs this voice only, data only, or voice and data? 2G,3G,4G,5G? For voice, is CS down, VoLTE down or both? Article is not clear on this, but I mainly see voice call complaints?
- tahoeskibum 1y agoAnd now Starlink is down as well. I wonder if they are related.
- briana775 1y ago[dead]
- briana775 1y ago[dead]