Three goes to zero as UK mobile provider suffers voice and text outage

Millions of customers left speechless

Britain's Three mobile network has suffered a major outage, with voice calls out of action and limitations on texting.

The problems kicked off early on Wednesday morning, with Three originally reporting that voice services were lost, but data was still working. This was later amended to say text messages were affected too, but data transmission remained operational.

"We're continuing to work on an issue affecting voice services which started earlier today. A small number of text messages are also being affected by the issue," a spokesperson told The Register.

"Data services are working normally, so calls can be placed via third-party messaging apps. We know how frustrating this is for our customers and we apologise for any inconvenience caused."

According to the Downdetector map, the outage is hitting across the UK, with Wales and Scotland hit hard as well. The company has not said what caused the outage, but at least third-party messaging apps are able to route around it.

That's a lot of peeved Brits - Source: Downdetector

Earlier this month, Vodafone and Three combined to form the joint-venture VodafoneThree, pledging to spend £11 billion ($15 billion) on network improvements for faster data and improved voice calls over the next decade. That doesn't seem to have worked today.

We'll update as soon as new information comes in. Let us know in the forums what your experience has been. ®