Giffgaff grapples with network outage

Phone operator Giffgaff's network suffered an outage on Friday and at the time of writing the company had restored data, but not voice capability, to customers.

GiffGaff, a mobile virtual network operator that piggyback's on O2's network, first acknowledged the problems at 10:18am in a post on its forum. The outage, which affected the network as well as the company's own website, stemmed from a power outage at one of its suppliers caused by a burst water pipe.

"Wow giffgaff phone network fail! Been down all day.. What if I was stranded or kidnapped or something!?" AmazingPhil wrote in a tweet at 3:33pm.

By 3:52pm the company had brought data back to all customers, but voice services remained mostly unavailable.

"Engineers are implementing a workaround for voice services now," the company wrote at 4:03pm. "Voice services should be working for some customers and will continue to become available within the next hour or two for the rest. If your voice services are not working yet please be patient as the workaround is being rolled out across the country."