Meteor’s mobile network crashed earlier leaving tens of thousands of customers without a service for several hours.

The company said an outage on the network had affected the transfer of mobile data between 11.07am and 2.55pm.

“Service has now been restored and we are working with our vendors to establish the root cause of the incident,” the company’s parent Eircom said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the company had earlier tweeted: “We’re aware there is an issue with mobile data”.

She later added: “Regarding the outage we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and we are working on getting this resolved ASAP.”