Thousands of mobile phone customers in Kent are back in touch after a day of patchy service from O2.

The phone giant has been trying to fix the error affecting its network across the county, and has apologised for the shortfalls in service.

But in a message on its website late this afternoon, O2 said some affected customers were able to make calls again from 4.30 pm today and service across the region had now been restored.

At 4.40pm it said the problem was now fixed.

It comes after theft and vandalism at one of the firm's operations sites in east London.

The difficulties stretched as far as London and East Sussex.

A statement on O2's website earlier said: "We've got a problem that means you can't make calls, use the internet, or send/get texts and emails in parts of East London, North London, east Sussex and Kent.

"At the moment there is no estimated time for this to be fixed, however we're working on getting our network up and running as soon as possible and expect it to be today."

The glitch was first noted just before 1am today. O2 has sincerely apologised to affected customers.

But those expecting a payout may be sorely disappointed.

A comment on the site's blog today said: "Unfortunately, the nature of mobile services means that it is not possible for operators to derive which customers may or may not have used their mobiles in an affected area.

"As per the information we give customers when they join us, mobile networks are not fault-free. For instance, on a day to day basis coverage is affected by things like the thickness of the walls of the building you're in.

"We provide a quality and award-winning service to 22 million customers in the UK and spend £1m a day maintaining a network that covers 99 per cent of the population.

"While we are not able to offer compensation, customers can be reassured that we are doing everything to restore full service as soon as possible following this unforeseen incident."

But the comment was a change of heart for O2, which earlier ran the following words on its website: "Customers who can demonstrate a material loss as the result of this outage should contact customer service and we will review that on a case by case basis."

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