Disturbances in the mobile network: O2 customers affected, emergency numbers unavailable

In view of the significant disruptions in the mobile networks, several state authorities warned on Thursday that the emergency call would fail.

From Berlin it was said that the networks were disrupted nationwide.

The emergency call to the fire brigade and police could also be affected.

The Hanseatic City of Hamburg also reported a “failure of emergency calls”.

"The emergency numbers 110 and 112 are currently disrupted," it said.

From Bremen it was said that both emergency calls were "severely impaired".

In a tweet, the Hamburg police informed about the situation: "There seems to be disruption in the entire Hamburg telephone network at the moment.

In some cases, both some of our departments and the emergency number 110 are affected.” The cause of the failure was initially unknown.

"If you need help and are unsuccessful under the emergency numbers, dial 0421 19222," said Bremen.

The guards of the professional and voluntary fire brigade are occupied and can accept requests for help.

The disturbance has been around for about an hour, said a fire department spokesman.

It had previously become known that cell phone calls in the O2 network were temporarily not possible for some users.

The reason for the restrictions on mobile telephony was a fault on a voice transmission server, the company announced on Thursday afternoon.

However, a large part of the telephone calls can be transmitted via other servers.

They are working flat out to ensure that customers can make unlimited calls again.

"We regret the inconvenience and ask for your patience." Calls with apps like Whatsapp were possible via data transmission servers.

The Munich-based company announced on Twitter that calls in the 2G and 4G network were particularly affected.

We are working to “restore the service as soon as possible”.

Deutsche Telekom reported no disruptions.

A Vodafone spokesman said there were only slight restrictions on LTE telephony in its own network.

However, these are not a problem for customers because their calls are then controlled via the GSM (2G) network.

On Thursday afternoon, there were around 19,500 comments from mobile phone users on the allestoerungen.de portal, who reported disruptions in the O2 network.

Several media had reported on this.

At allestoerungen.de, reports of alleged failures at Vodafone and Telekom have also increased since around 3:00 p.m., although not nearly as much as at O2.

The reason for this may have been that Vodafone and Telekom customers called someone in the O2 network and thought that the lack of connection was due to their own network - but in fact the network problems at O2 were the reason.