UK mobile network operator Three has confirmed it is experiencing widespread network issues that could affect thousands of customers up and down the country. Many frustrated customers took to social media to vent their annoyance at not being able to use any of the call, text, or data services on their phones.
According to popular internet service outage website Down Detector, reports of problems with Three UK’s network began at about 8am this morning and were peaking with thousands of complaints by 3pm, and hitting highs of more than 18,000 by 4pm.
Three’s official X, formerly Twitter, account posted at 2:51pm on Friday informing the public of the outage:
A Three spokesperson also issued the same statement to Express.co.uk.
“Hope there’ll be some sort of compensation for this, bit of a joke,” X user @stephenprice96 said, while @joe_shimmin commented, “And yet network status says no issues!! Sort it out. No service at all”.
“Anyone else having issues with three network. I’ve had no signal for hours now!!” @Hannahli1989 posted on X, while fellow social media user @MikeyCbg said, “Affecting me now, for the third time today. @ThreeUK please update your network status tool to reflect this. I wasted a lot of time checking out my phone earlier.”
Three has not said what the cause of the apparent issue is, or how many customers are affected and in which areas of the UK.
“Only now you decide to act? It’s been like this since 5am!! I’ve had nothing all day!! Disgusting service and have been a customer for more than 10 years. Time to look elsewhere now. Compensation is needed to reflect the disgraceful service you are giving us,” said X user @DA7Guy46.
Unplanned network issues like this can often leave customers without mobile signal, and there’s nothing you can do except wait for your provider to fix the problem. Three uses different mobile frequencies and equipment to O2, Vodafone, and EE, so this particular outage should not be affecting those providers’ signal.
However it can also affect the smaller mobile networks that use Three’s network to serve their customers, as appears to be the case with the operator Smarty, who posted on X: “We’re aware that a small number of customers may be experiencing issues with our network this morning. Our engineers are working hard to fix this as soon as possible. We’re so sorry if you’ve been impacted by this, please check back here for updates.”
Three-piggybacker network iD Mobile also told a customer it was experiencing issues. It said: “Hey there, Three UK are having some network issues at the moment, we apologise for any inconvenience caused, please try a device reboot. The app and website is also affected and unusable at this moment in time, and we hope that both will be resolved as soon as possible.”
