Ericsson has issued a statement apologising to its customers and customers’ customers for causing a lengthy loss of all mobile data and some voice services yesterday. As we reported, a failure in Ericsson software deployed by O2 UK and SoftBank in Japan led to a day-long service outage on Thursday, December 6th.

(Also see yesterday’s Week in Telco IT: Huawei CFO arrested in Canada ‘at US request’, while Ericsson is blamed for O2 UK and Japan network fails.)

As Jeremy Cowan reports, Ericsson’s statement says: “During December 6, 2018, Ericsson has identified an issue in certain nodes in the core network resulting in network disturbances for a limited number of customers in multiple countries using two specific software versions of the SGSN–MME (Serving GPRS Support Node – Mobility Management Entity).”

Börje Ekholm, president and CEO, Ericsson, says: “The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned and we apologise not only to our customers but also to their customers. We work hard to ensure that our customers can limit the impact and restore their services as soon as possible.”

An initial root cause analysis indicates that the main issue was an expired certificate in the software versions installed with these customers. A complete and comprehensive root cause analysis is still in progress. Our focus is now on solving the immediate issues.

Report by Jeremy Cowan.

During the course of December 6, most of the affected customers’ network services have been successfully restored. We are working closely with the remaining customers that are still experiencing issues.”

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