An Ericsson equipment fault has been blamed on a mobile network outage spanning multiple countries that left millions without coverage, with some still affected.
The outage yesterday affected data access across the mobile services of operators including SoftBank in Japan and O2 in the UK.
SoftBank has reported that its outage lasted nearly five hours starting at around 1:39pm local time, and affected its SoftBank and Y!mobile branded LTE services, as well as its SoftBank Air wireless broadband and Ouchi-No-Denwa fixed line services
Ericsson said it has traced the fault to an issue in certain nodes in the core network for customers in countries using two specific configurations of the SGSN-MME (Serving GPRS Support Node – Mobility Management Entity) platform.
Initial root cause analysis indicates that the main issue was an expired certificate in the software installed with SoftBank and O2, but a more comprehensive root cause analysis is still underway.
The company said that as of the end of yesterday, “most” of the affected customers’ network services have been successfully restored, but that some customers were still experiencing issues.
“The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned and we apologize not only to our customers but also to their customers,” Ericsson president and CEO Börje Ekholm said.
“We work hard to ensure that our customers can limit the impact and restore their services as soon as possible.”