A widespread failure in Telenor's mobile network on Thursday afternoon prevented an Oslo couple from submitting the winning bid on what they called their dream home, according to VG. Freya, 36, and Erik, 34, Murzagaliyev spent the morning in a bidding round on a property at Nordstrand in Oslo, competing against at least two other couples. Their final offer never reached the estate agent because the message would not send.
The outage also halted train traffic, left people unable to reach emergency services, disrupted calls to out-of-hours clinics and AMK emergency medical dispatch centres, and affected personal safety alarms, VG reports. Telenor says it is still working to establish the full scope of the failure.
Why it matters
The case illustrates how completely everyday transactions in Norway now depend on a functioning mobile network. A bidding round is a legally binding process governed by Norwegian contract law: once a seller accepts an offer in writing within the deadline, the property is sold. When the channel for sending that offer goes down, there is no fallback and no second chance.
The couple had two children, aged three and five. Their older child was about to start school, and they wanted a shorter walk to school. They described the Nordstrand property as their dream home, and Erik said the pair believe the amount they intended to bid would have been enough to secure it.
Minutes to decide, and a message that would not send
Bidding intensified as the round drew to a close, with rapid exchanges back and forth between the competing buyers. Freya said she and Erik discussed whether to raise their offer, knowing they had only minutes to act. They agreed on a final figure and sent it to the estate agent, who was to pass it on to the seller. The message did not go through.
"I panicked and thought, what is happening?" Freya told VG. She said she tried everything to get the message sent, without success.
Erik described the timing as extremely unfortunate and said the couple believe they would have won the house had Telenor not been experiencing problems that day. Both stressed that others affected by the outage faced far more serious consequences.
The couple is now continuing its search. Freya said few homes come up for sale in the area and that the other property had their absolute ideal location.
Øystein Opheim of the estate agency Eiendomsmegler 1, who ran the bidding round, confirmed he could not reach the couple. He did reach the other bidding couple and the seller, and he assumes that was because they use a different mobile operator from Telenor.
Opheim said the rules of contract law carry decisive weight in such situations, and that the home was sold once the seller accepted an offer in writing within the deadline. He learned what had happened only about half an hour later, when he received a notification from VG about the Telenor failure. He said the agency had never experienced anything like it and called it pure bad luck that it occurred within those few minutes. He added that he fully understands the couple's frustration and that the company has discussed the incident internally.
Telenor apologises and continues its investigation
Vetle Andersen, head of communications at Telenor, told VG it was very sad to hear that problems arose during the bidding round. He said the company is still investigating which services the fault affected, and that so far it has found no indication that the SMS service failed during the relevant period. He added, however, that Telenor cannot rule out that the fault caused more problems than those it is aware of.
That account differs from what VG heard from readers who reported difficulty sending text messages on Thursday. When the fault was resolved, Telenor also said in a press release that the situation for SMS and mobile data had returned to normal. Andersen repeated the company's apology, saying it was sad that the incident affected a customer's housing plans.
What to watch
Telenor has not yet published a full account of which services were hit or how many customers were affected. The company's continuing investigation, and any regulatory response to the outage, will determine whether the incident prompts changes to how operators report and handle major network failures.
