O2 blames supplier for massive data outage

Millions of Britons awoke to a true 21st century nightmare on Thursday - their smartphones had no data service.

The O2 network has suffered an outage, at the hands of third-party equipment, according to the Telefonica-owned company.

It wasn’t just O2 customers experiencing issues either, with all of the providers O2 sells airtime to - including Giffgaff, Lycamobile, Sky Mobile and Tesco Mobile - also on the blink.

Live bus information boards at stops across London were also out, as the system used by Transport for London to feed bus location information to the signs relies on the O2 network.

O2 placed all the blame on an unnamed supplier, suggesting that supplier’s equipment was having problems of an international scale.

“We believe other mobile operators around the world are also affected,” a spokesperson for the mobile network said.

“Our technical teams are working with their teams to ensure this is fixed as quickly as possible.”

Earlier in the day, many Japanese mobile users were also without service as the SoftBank network also suffered data outages.

It wasn’t immediately clear if these outages were related to the supplier problems alluded to by O2.