Thousands of EE and BT customers across the UK have been affected by a widespread mobile network outage, with users reporting problems making or receiving calls on both mobiles and landlines.
Reports of the outage first appeared on the monitoring website Downdetector at 11:15am on Thursday, peaking at around 2:15pm when more than 2,600 EE customers reported being unable to access the network. The disruption was felt nationwide, from Glasgow to the south coast, with London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds among the worst-affected areas.
A BT spokesperson said: “We’re currently addressing an issue impacting our services. We apologise for any inconvenience caused; we’re working urgently to fix this issue and will provide a further update as soon as possible.” The Guardian understands that voice services were affected, but EE customers could still call 999 as normal.
While hundreds of users reported issues with other networks such as Vodafone and Three, Vodafone confirmed there were no problems with its own services. The spike in reports for those networks may have been due to customers being unable to reach EE users. EE, acquired by BT in 2016, has around 25 million UK customers, while the entire BT Group serves over 30 million.
