Three apologises after large weekend outage

Mobile phone network Three UK issued an apology to its customers on Monday, after a number of them were left unable to use their service on Saturday afternoon.

The company - which has around nine million customers in the UK - confirmed user reports that some calls and texts were not going through during the afternoon and evening, blaming a “temporary network issue”.

Calling services were now restored, and the CK Hutchison subsidiary added it was working to restore “full” service.

Three did not go into detail on one aspect of the user complaints, however, that their texts were being received by random numbers instead of the intended recipient.

The network did say some “customers and non-customers” may have received text messages from unknown senders on Saturday, but did not explain why it may have happened.

It simply advised customers to “ignore” any messages that could be deemed as “incorrect”.

A spokeswoman for Three apologised for the inconvenience, and said the network was “currently investigating the cause” of the weekend’s disruption.

The disruption and apparent text message misdirection problems came just months after Three reported a major data breach, whereby the names and addresses of its customers were accessed illegally.

Reports since then have suggested a number of Three customers are being targeted by phishing attacks as a result of the data breach.