Three outage

Today has been the first significant glitch since I switched my home Internet connection to Three mobile.

Their network was pretty much down, as far as I can tell, for 9 hours overnight. It even impacted roaming users abroad.

At the same time their website was stuck on a "we're doing maintenance" holding page. There was zero info on twitter and their press office wasn't answering the phone.

Things like this happen, but their handling of it has been extremely poor. No info at all from 10pm last night until after 8am this morning. Their first tweet of the day was a "business as usual" support query answer. There was nothing on their website or main twitter account until after their network was sort of back up.

I say sort of, because things have not been work well since. I'm seeing lots of packet loss on some US peering, sudden random >1 second latency and multiple disconnects for minute at a time.

I noticed it was down at about 2AM when I realised my load balancing wasn't working - it was just failing

I had a small blip of connection at about 7am then it came back at 09:15 whilst I was driving. I forced the connection other to the wired connection for the morning I was at home and honestly thought it was just my service until I left the house to walk the kids to school!

Since it's come back on I've noticed I'm actually getting better speeds than before. Speed tests day/night would always see a maximum speed of 120/121mb down. I could be working at 3 in the morning and it'd still peak at 120/121 either with speedtest or on the display in LTEinspecteur. Since the outage I'm getting 135-138mb down on speedstests and with LTEinspecteur which is a bit odd.

I wondered why my load balanced connection was giving me such fast speeds - 137 + 34 = 171

Edited by chriscdotcodotuk (Thu 17-Oct-19 11:52:54)

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

Since it's come back on I've noticed I'm actually getting better speeds than before. Speed tests day/night would always see a maximum speed of 120/121mb down. I could be working at 3 in the morning and it'd still peak at 120/121 either with speedtest or on the display in LTEinspecteur. Since the outage I'm getting 135-138mb down on speedstests and with LTEinspecteur which is a bit odd.

Same here, some of the time. My connection is normally 85 down at best. Occasionally today I've seen >90, with even bursting to 93.

And then five minutes later, 1 second latency and 10mbps...

The single stream test on TBB is even more different to normal. Normally I don't see more than about 55 down, this afternoon I'm seeing 73 !

But there is clearly some non-optimal setup in their network, as Speedtest.net thinks my nearest servers are the ones around Manchester, not Colchester and Chelmsford that it normally sees.

My Smarty sim went down @ 11:50PM last night completely. All 3 visible masts caput. The network appeared to refuse access to the APN at first clearly showing the network stats, but saying "invalid profile". 10 minutes later the network was refusing connections on both 3G and 4G completely and not handshaking at all.

Service started to wobble at around 5pm with the main mast going offline and pushing traffic to another which only supported band 20. I was hoping that 3 were updating the cell site to support the new band.

Service was off until 9am this morning, where it's returned but sporadic.

What annoyed me was the the page that is supposed to show network faults, has shown a fault for the entire year so far, so how are we supposed to tell if the network isn't working at all if they leave fault codes up there all the time.

Edited by gary333 (Thu 17-Oct-19 12:27:31)

Reports coming out that network upgrades in the London area have failed.

These upgrades have already rolled out in the North of England (which is why you're seeing better speeds) on the pipes in the north which we are all being routed through.

The upgrade will reflect with those speeds in the South when they manage to figure out what went wrong.

I'm in South Manchester and 3 went down around 23:50 and basically out until gone 9am today. That's phone service and broadband, 4G, 3G and HSPA+. HomeFi just the same. So zilch in real terms.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 17-Oct-19 15:18:15)

Are you saying the North should be okay and not have experienced the fault? If so, that's not the case (well certainly in South Yorkshire at least) as many of the people in my area have already been having a moan about the constant up and down of the network all day,

Tried a couple of friends in Northern Ireland who rely on Three phone coverage, none has had any problems. Network seems fine over there.

There were definitely some problems in Northern Ireland. Some of the network was up again by early this morning (it was up here in Essex for a while before it went down for another couple of hours), so some people, in some areas, may not have noticed.

Network completely messed up here tonight on 4G. Netflix must be cached internally as that works although slowly. Just about all websites timing out. Dropped to 3G and at least now service is passable across all services.

This (and the previous massive O2 outage) is very scary. How, in this day and age can a fault (or faults) bring down just about an entire network? There is obviously little or no redundancy built in to the infrastructure.

Thanks goodness for the backup EE connection here at home, as Three was offline for around 12 hours.

As we are now all so reliant on mobile technology I think more of us will be opting for dual-sim handsets running separate networks....

Dan

That's odd the way they handled it, whenever EE is down there's news articles and their twitter is just full of them saying our network is having issues. They never provide much info or timeframes however, so it's as good as being blind. All you know is yes, there is an issue.

only problem with dual sim is the second sim card slot might not get LTE+ (my three sim wont give me 4G+ in the S9 duos) now EE and Vodafone has unlimited thinking of leaving three due to lack of LTE+ (in general)

and Vodafone/o2 in my area has most of there masts upgraded to LTE+ so get on average above 50-150mb/s and like O2 they support in active data step up from 3g to 4g when data is actively in use where as EE and three get stuck on 3g until you stop using data for 5-10 seconds (seems ee and three have theirs setup so it has to be on H or 3G, if its on H+ it wont switch upto 4G or it just has to be idle for 5-10 seconds)

I'm on EE and I haven't seen 3G in literally months, I do not recall when I last saw it. I either get 4G or E, never 3G.

I do not suspect you will spend time stuck on 3G as you describe, simply as their 4G coverage is so good.

Network 3 prioritise 3G over band 20 4G, so I find in London I was on 3G a hell of a lot.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 21-Oct-19 19:02:45)

Note that any Android with EE firmware doesn't show the + but still gets the performance. In fact both EE and Vodafone can (mostly in cities,e.g. London) bond upto 5 carriers together because they have the spectrum.