Orange Suffers Network Fault

Orange in the UK suffered a severe outage yesterday morning that was reported to have affected something like 5% of their subscriber base - about 635,000 customers.

Orange itself refused to confirm the exact numbers involved or the what caused the problems, although the symptoms of a nationwide problem, with owners of several phones finding only one dead, with the other unaffected lead us to suspect a faulty HLR (Home Location Register) was at the root of the network fault.

All that Orange itself would say is "We confirm that a small number of Orange customers are currently unable to make or receive call on the Orange network. Our engineers and those of our network equipment suppliers are working to establish the cause of the fault and will restore service as soon as possible,"

The fault appears to have begun at 9am and continued for about 3 hours - although cellphones would only have connected to the network if turned off (or taken out of coverage) and then turned on again, so users could well have been without service for far longer if they didn't know that they had to "reset" their phone.'"

Posted to the site on 4th July 2002