O2 seeking millions in damages from Ericsson

After a pretty terrible outage, it’s become painfully apparent how much we all rely on mobile data. Customers on O2 will receive compensation but O2 / Telefonica are also seeking compensation from the people who caused the problem – Ericsson. According to The Telegraph there’s a damages bill of up to £100 million in the offing after Ericsson somehow forgot to renew some licences.

The outage caused a massive data failure across O2, giffgaff, Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile and Lycamobile. Customers had to run around and find WiFi instead and, as more people used phone calls to communicate instead, the networks saw some calls fail too.

The whole sorry story also shows how, despite all the resiliency and redundancy that is built into modern networks, a fairly simple mistake can still cause a massive failure.