Orange says an outage in its UK data network was caused by an unfortunate combination of hardware and software problems that struck simultaneously.
The problem affected almost all the carrier’s UK data users from Wednesday onwards, restricting access to 3G services and forcing customers to access the Internet via 2G and 2.5G connections instead.
Spokesman Conor Maples said the outage was caused by problems with some of the firm’s APNs – the points mobile phones connect to the Web -, caused by “an unusual software issue combined with a separate and localised hardware failure,” in a Tweet.
However he denied the problem had hit all the firm’s data users, stating that “some, but not all of our mobile data customers had problems accessing mobile Internet.”
While Orange said the problem had only struck on Wednesday and ran through to end Thursday, subscribers say they have had trouble with data access for up to a fortnight, ISP Review reports.