O2 claims huge damages from Ericsson for network problems

Last week in the United Kingdom there was a major failure on the O2 network. That company is now claiming tens of millions of pounds’ worth of compensation from the Swedish network giant Ericsson. The failure was caused by an expired software certificate.

That’s what The Telegraph says in a message. O2 and parent company Telefonica will negotiate the account with Ericsson. That account would amount to around £100 million. The Guardian also writes that Telefonica O2 UK CEO Mark Evans will meet with Ericsson later this week to discuss the software and its management.

30 million people

On Thursday 6 and Friday 7 December there was a major failure on the O2 mobile network. Around 30 million people use that network, including many business users. They all had problems with their mobile networks, which showed that the problem was caused by expired software licenses on Ericsson’s systems.

The Swedish company announced this itself last week: An initial analysis indicates that the main problem lies in an expired certificate in the software versions that these customers have installed. We are currently carrying out a full and comprehensive analysis. However, our focus now is on solving the problems.

New software

The problem seems to affect the core networks of Ericsson customers using two specific software versions of the Serving GPRS Support Node РMobility Management Entity (SGSN-MME). The software that caused these problems is being phased out, and we apologize to our customers and their customers, says Ericsson CEO B̦rje Ekholm.

It was not only the British who were affected by problems with their networks. SoftBank also had problems in Japan for some time. There, too, there were problems with Ericsson’s software, which caused the network to fail. There the problems were solved relatively quickly, after switching back to an older version of the software.