Three: Don’t blame O2 buy-out for huge Irish outage

More than a million Three customers suffered a network outage in Ireland yesterday after the mobile operator's data centre overheated.

The crash affected as many as 1.5 million Irish mobile users. Many of the affected customers who took to Twitter to vent their fury were previous O2 customers transferred over to Three's network following a 10.25 billion buy-out of O2 by Three owner Hutchinson, confirmed last month.

Users were left unable to use their data, send texts or make calls, but Three told IT Pro the issue was a technical fault in a datacentre, rather than a problem arising from the acquisition of O2.

"We'd like to confirm that service issues which affected some customers were the result of an electrical failure at one of our data centres and were not connected to O2 and Three coming together," a spokesperson said.

Work to resolve the problem continued overnight and Three's Irish Twitter profile claimed the network was again up and running at around 7am this morning.

Stephen White tweeted: "Years with O2 with no issue. Moved to Three not by choice and whole network goes down?"

Philip World's tweet read: "Just got transferred across the Three mobile network from O2. Patchy service all afternoon. What a lovely welcome."