Millions suffer as O2 network stumbles

O2 had serious network problems earlier in 2012

A fault affecting millions of customers on O2's mobile network has been fixed, the operator has confirmed.

O2 said about 10% of its 22 million customers had suffered an intermittent service since 12:00 GMT on Friday.

The operator said the technical fault was fixed on Friday evening and the network has since been restored.

O2 said they were working to discover what caused the glitch, but it was not the same fault that cut off millions of customers in July.

The firm have advised any customers still having difficulty connecting to the network to switch their handset off and on again.

Initially, O2 promised to have the problem fixed by 16:30 GMT on Friday but the issue was still marked as "ongoing" on its network status page more than three hours after that time.

"Further to our previous update where some customers in some areas have been unable to make or receive calls, send texts or use data, the cause of the fault was identified and fixed," a spokeswoman for the operator told the BBC on Friday.

"Due to high traffic levels during the peak early evening period customers may experience intermittent performance as full service is recovered.

"We would like to reassure those customers still impacted that we are working as hard as we can to systematically restore their full service."

The number of people checking to see if there were any problems near them has also caused problems for O2.

A tool that let people type in their postcode and find out local problems stopped working as the network problem rolled on.