An outage in O2's network on Friday left 10% of its customers unable to use their phones on Friday.
O2 admitted the fault late Friday afternoon, saying one of the network nodes for connecting its traffic had fallen over. This meant O2 customers were unable to make or receive calls, send or receive texts or use their mobile data for several hours.
Although it only took O2 three hours to find a fix, the effect was still being felt well into the evening by its customers. O2 blamed the "rush hour" traffic it always gets in the early evening when many leave work.
"Due to high phone use during the 'rush hour' early evening period, customers may experience intermittent performance as full service comes back for everyone," said O2.
"We would like to reassure those customers still affected that we are working as hard as we can to restore normal service to everyone."
O2 rules out prospect of compensation
The mobile operator said the fault was not the same as that which took down the network in July, leading to a 24-hour blackout on O2's mobile network.
O2 said it would not be offering compensation, as it had done in the previous incident.
When asked if it was sure the issue wouldn't reoccur, O2 read from a statement: "We operate to the highest industry standards and using leading industry infrastructure. We will continue to challenge and assess what further steps we and our infrastructure partners can take to further improve our network performance."
O2 said the fault is now fixed. If you are still having issues, O2 suggests restarting your handset.
