O2 compensates customers with free service Almost 8m O2 mobile phone customers in the UK will be given several days of free service in compensation for an unprecedented network failure that left them without calls, texts or access data over the internet for more than 24 hours. The mobile operator, which is owned by Spain's Telefónica, has been forced to apologise and hand over compensation to about a third of its customers given the level of anger about the network outage last week. The network failure was particularly embarrassing for O2 UK given its position as the provider of mobile telecoms services to the 2012 Olympics in London. The mobile and WiFi networks are already expected to come under considerable strain from people making calls and sending photos from events. Those customers whose devices could not connect to the network will be given the equivalent of three days access, in addition to a £10 voucher to spend in store. Business customers with more than 10 connections will receive details directly about compensation. In a statement, the company said: "The issue we had was unprecedented and we recognise that this caused inconvenience and frustration for those who had a disruption in service. We have now identified all those customers directly affected. The fault in the network has been linked to systems provided by Ericsson, the Swedish telecom equipment maker, which meant that the network failed to recognise the devices. In a call following its quarterly results on Wednesday morning, Hans Vestberg, chief executive of Ericsson, said that telecoms networks were coming under strain from the amount of data traffic that was being used by smartphones and other mobile network devices. He said: "First of all we have been involved [in the O2 outage]. The service has been restored. There are challenges, and here I'm speaking generally, where there is a huge amount of technology coming online at the same time such as smartphones and mobile broadband. It will create new patterns [of use]. That is putting pressure on the networks. Mobile operators do not typically give compensation for brief network outages, although there have been several recent large scale failures that have forced such action. France Telecom's Orange gave a free day of phone use as well as cinema tickets following a nine hour network failure two weeks ago, while Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, gave users more than $100 worth of free applications. Additional reporting by Richard Milne in Oslo