Datacentre glitch knocks out Three mobile network in Ireland

Three has blamed an Ireland-wide network outage on an electrical fault in one of its datacentres after millions of users were left without service over the Easter weekend. 

The problems started around 2pm on Easter Monday and are thought to have affected many of the firm’s two million customers in Ireland, prompting numerous complaints on social media site Twitter from people unable to make calls, send text messages or access data services on their phones. 

Among the complaints about service problems were angry missives accusing Three Ireland of failing to keep customers fully updated about the scope and scale of the problems, as the company’s customer service centres were unreachable for some time during the outage.

A trawl of the social network also revealed the issues affected services for O2 customers, who were recently transferred to Three through the merger of the two mobile networks, and Tesco Mobile Ireland users.

@ThreeCare Yet again we are! Disaster since ye took over @O2IRL - Never ever had so many problems. @VodafoneIreland looking attractive again

— CMDIRL (@CMDIRL) April 6, 2015

@ThreeCare I never had this problem with 02.One month with 3 and this happens. Only one tweet as a form of communication. please advise asap

— Ciara Burke (@CiaraCal) April 6, 2015

In a series of posts from the Three Ireland Online Twitter team, the company said the issue has now been resolved. “Thanks for your patience. We apologise for any inconvenience caused,” the company said. 

Computer Weekly contacted Three Ireland for further information about the network downtime and was told the problems were linked to an electrical problem at one of the firm’s Irish datacentres. 

“Some customers had been experiencing intermittent 2G and 3G service issues. This had occurred due to an electrical failure at one of our datacentres which caused an increase in temperature in the building and then subsequently impacted some systems affecting customer service,” the statement read.