It seems that the recent major outage in the UK on the O2 network may have big repercussions for the company as unhappy customers are set to leave after the down time. We have news on that for you today as well as a caution about a fake security update also concerning O2.

The outage spread across 24 hours over two days last week and we know from the comments to our posts about updates on the situation and complaints that plenty of O2 customers were upset and frustrated by the loss of service over such a long amount of time. Now a snap poll has been conducted about the down time and its effect on O2 customers and it seems that around a third are considering leaving the network provider.

News of the snap poll came to us from T3 and was carried out by MyVoucherCodes.co.uk with almost 900 O2 customers affected by the outage. Of those customers 34% said they intended to leave O2’s service when their contract became due for renewal. 83% said that O2 should have offered compensation in the form of free credit for PAYG customers or money deducted from their bills. To be frank we’re not actually surprised that around a third of O2 customers say they will leave the network although of course that figure may not turn out to be so high as by the time contracts become due for renewal some people will not feel as strongly as they do now.

In other O2 news we want to caution readers that a phishing scam is currently operating on the back of the network outage. Emails purporting to be from O2 are being sent to mobile customers to try to get account details from people. The bogus account security update uses an email that states, “As part of ongoing upgrade, We (sic) have introduced a new internet security into our online services to protect all our users (sic) information. We endeavour all our user’s (sic) to protect their account by clicking on the link below.” As you can see this is riddled with errors but nevertheless it could dupe some people so please beware of these kinds of emails.

We learned of this scam through Net Security who tell how if you hit the link on the scam email you’ll be taken to a bogus account login page, “O2 security update” but that this page was created in China little over two weeks ago. If you actually enter your account details you’ll then be redirected to the official O2 login page. O2 has stated that no such ‘security update’ emails have been sent from the company so please be cautioned against falling for this scam.

We’d like to ask our readers who are O2 UK customers if you have received any of these scam emails? Were you affected by the O2 outage and if so are you also considering leaving the network? Do you think O2 could have handled its customer response to the outage better? Let us know with your comments.