UPDATE EE UK Suffers Mobile Data Network Wobble

Customers of EE’s mobile network, especially those trying to access Mobile Broadband (data) services, are reporting sporadic connectivity problems from various locations across the United Kingdom; although most appear to be centred on London (probably due to its huge population)

Unfortunately EE still doesn’t seem able to provide a useful Service Status page and their community forum is full of complaints, albeit with very few answers. Otherwise the reports from subscribers suggest that the problem began at around 8am or 9am this morning, with many saying that they received the following message: “Could not activate cellular data network. PDP Authentication Failure“.

Similar problems have been experienced by EE’s customers in the past and a quick look at the operators Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/EE) for the same time period shows that somebody in the operators support department has had a busy morning with the Copy & Paste key: “We’ve been investigating coverage issues this morning. Please try rebooting your phone now & let us know if it fixes the issue.”

EE’s support department currently appears to be suggesting that the fault has now been resolved, although apparently you’ll need to restart your phone in order to find out. However some customers are still reporting sporadic connectivity problems (i.e. sometimes it works, others it doesn’t).

UPDATE 10:39am

A spokesperson has given us the following update.

An EE Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Data services were affected for a few thousand customers attaching to the network through our Luton data centre for a little over an hour this morning, due to a firewall issue in that centre. This was fixed at around 9.20am, and was not a nationwide issue – it only affected some of the customers coming through the Luton centre even if they were in other parts of the UK – we are seeing customers reattaching to the network. Any customers still affected should toggle to ‘Airplane Mode’ to reconnect.”