Status-Q

Readers in the UK will be familiar with the ‘EE’ mobile network operator, and those with a long memory may recall that its original name was ‘Everything Everywhere’.  Well, that’s just what they have been failing to provide today.

I spent a happy few hours today trying to work out why my mother’s phone wasn’t able to make or receive calls. It’s a difficult thing to diagnose remotely, so, after the first hour, I drove an hour down the road to her house to carry on the investigation.  

Eventually, after checking all the possible mobile-service-related settings on the iPhone, restarting, rebooting, turning airplane mode on and off — you know the routine — I started experimenting with swapping SIMs with my Vodafone one, and found that her EE SIM could only call landlines and not other mobiles. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it had to be something related to her actual mobile account or connection.    

Had she run out of credit or minutes or something?   Why, in that case, couldn’t she receive calls either? I logged into her EE account — no issues reported there.  Installed their app — nothing reported there.  They had a web page where you could check for any known issues in your area — all showing a happy, green status.  I’m embarrassed to admit that I still have a Twitter account, so I looked at ‘@EE’: nothing posted there either… for a year or more.  

Because the key thing you really want to know at this stage is, “Is it only me? Is anybody else seeing this?  Could it actually be an issue not related to my account or my equipment?”

And then I searched Twitter for what other people were saying about ‘@EE’.  And that’s when I discovered that no, we most certainly were not alone!  There were huge numbers of people suffering from the same issues.  And gradually, other websites like TechRadar started to report on what was happening, mostly initiated by the reports on DownDetector.

It turns out that it’s not just EE: Vodafone and Three have been having problems today too:

So it’s a pretty nationwide problem.  

But try finding any reference to it on the websites of any of these companies!  I couldn’t.  In fact, it’s pretty hard to find a proper support page at all.    I have both Vodafone and EE SIMs myself, yet has anybody notified me that there might be problems?  Not a squeak.

All they need is a banner at the top of their website saying, “Sorry, some customers are experiencing problems with their mobile service at present. We’re working on it!”  That would have saved me a couple of hours of driving and a couple of hours of troubleshooting today.  But when companies get to a certain size, they stop caring about communicating with their users, and the marketing departments have more clout than the customer support departments.  Cory Doctorow has a word for this.

Of course, it may also be that companies over a certain size have so much bureaucracy in place relating to their online presence that they can’t actually make quick changes to their website to respond to issues in a timely fashion!

So I’m going to start paying more attention to sites like DownDetector.  It would be a source of distress to me if I had to depend on Twitter(X) for anything these days.

And another thing occurred to me. This was, I think, only an issue with routing traditional phone calls between networks.  (That’s not a trivial problem; I can remember, for example, when you could only send SMS texts to people who were on the same network as you were.  I’m much less concerned that the networks had technical challenges than I am that they did such an appalling job with customer communication when it happened.)   But here’s the thing:  I don’t think you would have been affected if you were making your calls with FaceTime.   Or Signal. Or if you’d made that Faustian bargain and used WhatsApp.  (And, possibly, even if you’d enabled Wifi calling and used your normal number routed over the internet.)  People under 35 probably barely noticed.

No, this particular outage affected those making traditional phone calls in the traditional way.  And I wonder for how much longer that’ll be an issue?