Joy of Christmas

The huge number of text messages sent on Christmas Day led to one network’s service crashing temporarily.

The mobile phone operator O2 said it dealt with 30 per cent more text messages this Christmas Day than last year – about 65 million in total, its most in one day.

However, the network became so congested by mid-morning that its computer nearly ground to a halt and around 3.25 million messages were delayed.

A spokesman for O2 said it had “a huge volume of traffic” on Christmas Day. The spokesman said: “At 10.40 am this hit a peak and consequently a small number of our customers experienced problems.

“We estimate five per cent of our customers had messages delayed in being sent. All were delivered but some messages may have been delayed by a few hours. Most were delivered within two hours.”

The spokesman said O2 dealt with around one billion and a quarter texts per month and experienced large increases in numbers of people sending texts on certain days or for specific events.

In 2005, the company noted a particularly large surge after Liverpool’s win in the Champions League Final against AC Milan.

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