Internet services across the UK are under heavy load as countless office staff are asked to work from home.
With the UK government's latest advice on combatting coronavirus, office-based companies across the UK have been asking employees to work from home. Many companies have replaced meetings with phone calls and teleconferences, and have switched to online collaboration services such as Microsoft Teams or Slack to organise work.
Home broadband systems throughout the UK have been seeing increased load due to staff working from home, with some customers noticing reduced speeds. Other online services such as Microsoft Teams and teleconferencing software Zoom have been experiencing disruption as demand for their services spikes.
All UK mobile operators have seen disruptions over the past 48 hours, but the problem has reportedly been blamed on "interconnect issues" between operators. EE claimed that the disruption was not connected to the rise in working from home due to coronavirus isolation but by a technical fault.
An O2 representative explained the fault to the BBC recently, saying that O2, Vodafone, and Three customers were temporarily unable to connect to EE customers and vice versa, effectively isolating the phone systems for those providers. Issues affected only phone calls made by users on 2G, 3G, and 4G, and didn't affect text messaging or data. The problem has since been corrected.
Source: BBC News, Downdetector
