It’s never ideal when your phone network has an outage, but it’s even more annoying over a bank holiday weekend. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Three customers are facing over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, as customers are reporting missing credit and loss of access to calls and mobile data.
Three’s St. Patrick’s Weekend Outage
In the early hours of Sunday morning, reports began emerging that Three prepay customers noticed their prepay credit was going missing and mobile data was not working. One Redditor stated online they weren’t “due to top up for another 2 weeks and woke up with all ‘my [their] credit used up”. Another Reddit user commented, stating, “mobile data is not working at all”, while customer care confirmed voice services are also affected.
Customers also took to Three’s own forum, 3Community, to voice concerns. One customer saying they “[topped up their] number on 14th March, but today (16th March) around 1 AM, I suddenly do not have any allowance and do not have access to text, phone and internet”. In this thread and others, several other customers report the same issues.
I myself am on Three prepay and have been completely unaffected, however I have a family member who is affected, by both credit loss and loss of data services. Which points to a partial explanation of the issue.
I have one of Three’s newer plans. I top up every month and the credit on my account is immediately “taken” and put towards my plan.
My family member is on a much older plan. With these plans, when you top up your plan is activated, but you keep the credit in your balance. You can then use this credit on out of bundle calling, texting, roaming or by buying using “pay with mobile” style services.
It would appear that these older customers groups are affected while newer customers are not. Typically with technology, legacy systems are more difficult to maintain in-line with modern updates. I would imagine this is what happened here.
The timing is also aligned to a potential systems update. Another Redditor stated they “work night shifts, right around 23:50 my allowances shut off working even though I topped up only 10 days ago”. This would be a fairly typical time for a system update to start rolling out.
Three’s Response to the Outage
I’ve reached out to Three for comment and will update the article as soon as that response comes in. Three’s customer care is active over the weekend both on phones and web chat. Their web chat agents clarified that “some Three prepay customers are experiencing issues with price plans and bundles allowances”. They also confirmed that both data and voice services are also impacted leaving customers “unable to use call and data services”.
The agent added that, “Three’s technical team is working to resolve this disruption”.
