Thousands of users are reporting issues with one of the biggest phone networks in the UK. Three UK customers have experienced problems making calls over the network with a big spike in outage reported by Downdetector and Statusisdown since 1300 (UK time).
Calls can't be made at the time of writing (no dialing tone) and it is impacting users on Three's MVNO partners like IDMobile, Superdrug Mobile and Smarty. In a worrying development, O2, Vodafone, BT and EE are all experiencing a significant increase in outages being reported in the past two hours, albeit on a smaller scale.
Mark Wilson on TechRadar is also running a regularly-updated live blog on the Three UK current outage.
Three UK hasn't issued any statement with its latest update announcing that the Samsung Galaxy S25 is going on preorder. ThreeUK issued a statement a few minutes ago.
We're aware of an issue affecting a small percentage of voice services, our team are working hard to fix this as soon as possible. We're really sorry for any inconvenience caused. Data services and 999 calls are unaffected, please bear with us.January 23, 2025
I was not able to access its network status checker as of 1410 and was greeted with a time-out message, a clear sign that the site is experiencing a traffic surge
We have reached out to them on X (formerly Twitter) and were issued a generic statement from the official ThreeUKsupport account.
We're aware some customers are having issues with calls at the moment. We're working on resolving this as quickly as we can! We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. -JohnJanuary 23, 2025
The last time the network was down on such a scale was almost a year ago in February 2024. At its peak more than 12,000 people reported issues with the network on Downdetector (right now, that number has risen to 11,000, 6,500 4,000). Back then, Three didn't disclose the reason behind the outage.
That was preceded back in December 2023 by an even bigger outage that saw more than 20,000 reports appear on Downdetector. I wrote a piece on why you need to have a backup plan for broadband (which was impacted back then but not in the current outage).
We wouldn't speculate at this point whether the issue is linked with works following the announcement that Vodafone and Three are merging to form a new telecommunication giant worth £15 billion.
