O2’s data network has once again crashed, leaving customers unable to access the Internet through their smartphones. The service has been down Sunday and O2 has yet to indicate how long it will be out of action for.

This latest outage is particularly embarrassing for the company as it coincides with Vodafone’s announcement of its iPhone tariffs…

Reports began to surface on Sunday that people were having issues with their 3G connection across the UK. O2 tweeted on Sunday that, “We’re sorry that some mobile customers have had problems with data today – these services will be back up tonight”.

However, as of this afternoon people were still reporting issues with Internet connection and O2 again took to Twitter to communicate with customers: “We apologise to customers who cannot use data at the moment. We have a fault with the allocation of IP addresses which we are fixing”.

O2 has come under a lot of scrutiny for the performance of its data network and the firm has suffered a number of outages this year, particularly during the summer. It seems that O2’s network is not robust enough to handle the huge volume of traffic generated by iPhone users although this latest problem does not appear limited to iPhones.

Unfortunately for O2 this news coincides with Vodafone announcing that it will start selling the iPhone from January 14, 2012, and with Orange and even Tesco offering it this latest network crash could see more users heading somewhere else to get their iPhone fix.

O2 did recently announce that it was building 1,500 new network sites across the UK in an attempt to improve coverage, but that could prove to be too little too late.

UPDATE: No sooner had I hit ‘post’ on this blog, O2 announced that it was beginning to restore service to its data network: “Quick data services update: the system fault has been fixed and internet connections are gradually being restored”.

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