Suggestions for o2 rebranding...
O(noes)2
O2getconnected
O2Gaff - geddit?
Three-circa-'02 - I remember those heady days of Space1999 re-enactments
Nearly quarter of a million O2 customers struggled to make calls, send texts and use their mobile internet connections yesterday. The outage, triggered during upgrade work on the operator's 2G and 3G systems, also hit Tesco Mobile and came only a day after O2-owned GiffGaff suffered similar problems. Tesco and GiffGaff are …
It wasn't a database problem as such, it was actually a failed failover in a duplicated transaction processor (this actually took out two Irish MVNOs as well). The faulty processor failed partially, and because it wasn't completely failed the other processor didn't take over.
The resulting surge of people flocking to the giffgaff web site to look for help/vent/top-up etc ended up swamping the system (about a 400% increase in traffic I believe) and so a lot of transactions ended up being queued and giffgaff had to take their main web site off line to recover the situation.
From the article ""around 1 per cent" of customers, which would be 220,000 based on their latest figures and not including those on Tesco's network", so 22,000 would be about 0.1%
Not that I noticed any downtime on my O2... I'll leave you to decide whether that's because I was in the other 99% or whether I'm just unpopular (boo hoo).
The MSC and HLR are different components, a single HLR will hold accounts for a number of users, an MSC will switch calls for a given area, therefore GiffGaff will use O2's MSC's but could well have their own (or a dedicated) HLR
Given that this seemed to affect a 'random' subset of customers I'd say its an HLR upgrade that went tits.
Often the MSC & HLR run the same 'operating system' no not Vista but some sort of custom setup from someone like Ericsson so the upgrade program may have been to both MSCs & HLRs but in this case it was the HLR that they broke.
After losing data signal, my mate put on the loudspeeker as he rang customer services. First they gave him a different number after finally navigating the dreadful "press a number for the right service" menu. Then THAT number asked him "Why don't you visit our website and avoid delays to answer your question?" To which we both smiled...