O2 UK suffered from a network outage that affected a number of its customers for almost a day, while France Telecom said a similar issue on its network last week was caused by a software problem.



The O2 network issue, in which customers had difficulty making or receiving calls, sending texts or using data, was first identified early on Wednesday (yesterday) afternoon. The operator’s Live Status Checker stated at 16:45 yesterday that its engineers were dealing with the problem as a priority.



The issue continued to dog the network throughout the evening and early morning with the company confirming at 01:00 this morning that the problems were down to a fault with one of its network systems, which meant mobile numbers were not registering properly with the network. O2 said it and its central supplier had deployed “all possible resources” to deal with the problem overnight.



By 10:00 this morning the 2G network had been fully restored, meaning customers could make and receive calls, while 3G data services were starting to come back on line. Customers were advised to switch their devices off and on again as service returned.



France Telecom chief executive Stephane Richard said a similar outage of the Orange network in France late last week was caused by a software problem on kit provided by infrastructure provider Alcatel-Lucent, reports Reuters.



Richard said there appeared to be a problem with a software update that had taken place two days before the 10 hour outage that left 26 million customers unable to make calls or send text messages. The France Telecom chief made the comments in a testimony before France’s National Assembly.