O2's network goes down in parts of South East England

O2's mobile network is down in parts of South East England for the second time this week, the company has said.

The operator's data services suffered a three-hour outage in parts of the region on Tuesday, but on Friday morning O2 said voice, SMS and data facilities were unavailable to some customers in parts of London, Kent and East Sussex.

"At 10 o'clock this morning we identified a connectivity issue on our network which is affecting both 2G and 3G service in parts of East London, North London, Kent and East Sussex," a spokesman said. "Customers in these areas may be experiencing difficulty in making or receiving mobile calls, texts or using data."

O2's spokesman said the company's engineers were working to identify the problem and resolve it as soon as possible.

UPDATED: O2 have got in touch to say that service was restored at 10:50am. The company said the issue was "the result of planned work designed to ensure the robustness of the network following theft and vandalism at a site in East London last month".