It’s been a tough few days for mobile phone company O2. The problems began on Wednesday afternoon when some users lost the signal on their phones, and it didn’t take long for Twitter to strain under the weight of angry customer comments.

While the firm either doesn’t know, or is refusing to say, how many of its 23 million customers are affected – GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile also use the same mobile masts – it seems that the network failure is widespread. Even into the second day of the problem there were still lots of unanswered questions, primarily: what caused the issue, and when could it be fixed. Again, O2 weren’t able to give customers much information on these points. It wasn’t all that long ago that rival provider BlackBerry had its own serious and damaging network outage, and superficial comparisons are easy to make.

So, has O2 learnt from history?

Firstly, it seems (fingers crossed as I’m an O2 user) that the problem isn’t as bad as it was for BlackBerry. Some peoples’ phones weren’t affected, and O2 was able to at least reboot its 2G network within 18 hours.

More importantly, though, is how the company has communicated to its users about the problems. As already noted, they haven’t been able to answer all the crucial questions yet, but they are keeping us informed about what’s going on. An O2 statement released on Thursday morning said: “We can confirm that our 2G network service has now been restored… Our 3G service is starting to restore and customers should expect to see a gradual return of data services as the day progresses.” They even told people how they could reboot their phone to access some services again.

O2 has used the news media, its own website (with a very clear, obvious message at the top of the homepage) plus some reasonably timely Facebook and Twitter updates to get its message across. All in all they covered most bases to keep us informed.

One mantra we often repeat for companies in a crisis is: apologise and tell customers what’s going on; fix it as quickly as you can; then recompense afterwards. This crisis may not be over just yet, but it looks like O2’s brand might be able to come out of this relatively undamaged.

Tweeting in style

Just one example of how O2 addressed its customer base with a sense of humour over the network outage: