Graham Fraser and Tom Gerken
Technology reporters
The mobile network Three has said some 999 calls didn’t get through during a major outage which affected thousands of customers.
The company said the problems with its services on Thursday were now fixed, but has warned of further issues due to Storm Éowyn.
Scores of customers contacted the BBC to describe the disruption the network failure on Thursday caused them, with some saying they had been left unable to phone 999.
While the BBC has not been able to independently verify their claims, Three has told the BBC it had received reports of 999 call failures affecting no more than ten customers, and had launched an investigation.
A Three spokesperson said: “A normal volume of 999 calls were connected yesterday and our monitoring confirms the service is working fully this morning.
“We apologise sincerely for the inconvenience caused by the issues on our voice network yesterday.”
More than ten thousand people told outage tracker Downdetector they were unable to make or receive phone calls on Three on Thursday.
There were also several thousand reports from users of Smarty and ID Mobile – smaller mobile companies which use Three’s network.
Since 2009, Ofcom has expected all UK mobile network operators to enable people to call 999 – thereby allowing users to make emergency calls when out of the coverage of their home network. When a network is down or has no coverage, emergency calls will roam onto any available network in the area.
A spokesperson from Three said: “BT, who operate the 999 service, have confirmed that call traffic originating from our network was what they would have expected yesterday.
“Reports from our customers having issues with 999 calls are in single figures. We are taking these reports very seriously and are investigating them.”
Storm Éowyn has also caused problems for Three on Friday.
A spokesperson from Three said: “Following an issue affecting voice calls yesterday, our services are now fully back to normal, apart from some localised issues related to Storm Éowyn. We are very sorry for any inconvenience it caused to our customers.”
The spokesperson said extra engineering resources had been deployed to deal with any disruption caused by the storm, which is battering the UK on Friday.
Just after 08:00 on Friday, Downdetector had over 1,300 reports of outages on Three but it has diminished since then. Three also told the BBC a “very small number” of people who are connected to WiFi when calling are not getting through on Friday.
Three has around 10.5m customers across the UK, according to its website, but it is unclear how many of them were affected by the outage.
Many people on social media shared their frustration and described the disruption they said it had caused them.
One person claimed they had “missed a medical appointment” as a result of being unable to receive calls, while another said the issues had left their daughter “stranded”.
And several people have claimed they would be leaving the network altogether.
In a statement on Thursday, the regulator Ofcom said it was in contact with the network to “establish the scale and cause of the problem as soon as possible”.
It is not known whether customers will be able to claim compensation for the outage, although according to the Ofcom website it “may be appropriate” for providers to offer refunds “while repairs are being made”.
It comes a month after the UK regulator gave the go-ahead for Three to merge with former rival Vodafone in a £16.5bn deal.
Meanwhile, the Three outage occured on the same day a major outage affected artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.
