Ever wondered what life was like before the mobile phone? Well for swathes of O2 customers in the UK, that has been their reality since mid afternoon yesterday. Okay, network outages happen. It's a fact of modern-day life. But a nationwide problem that persists for so long is a horrible reminder of our digital dependency. The BBC reports that the problem O2 is facing relates to a core network element called the HLR, or Home Location Register. Essentially a big fat database of who's allowed onto the network. It seems that one of these has headed south, and has failed to be
