EE UK Suffers 4G Mobile Data Wobble in Southern England UPDATE

Some customers of mobile operator EE (BT) are this morning reporting a sporadic loss of 4G data connectivity (mobile broadband) on their Smartphones in parts of Southern England, such as around Bristol, Crawley, Brighton, London and Thurroc, among other areas

The issue appears to have started at around 8am today and those affected report that their mobiles are now returning a “PDP authentication failure” (Packet Data Protocol). Meanwhile EE’s customer support numbers merely confirm the existence of a “technical issue“, but provide no other meaningful information.

Assuming this is a problem with EE’s authentication servers (possibly related to corrupt, mismatched or missing network information) then such issues usually only take a few short hours to resolve, which hopefully means that the downtime will soon come to an end (after this you might need to reboot your mobile or put it briefly into Airplane mode in order to reconnect).

UPDATE 1:05pm

The service seems to have returned to normal for most people, although a few are still reporting issues.

An EE Spokesperson said:

“Earlier this morning some customers experienced problems using 4G data services in some Southern areas of the UK. Voice and text messages services were not affected, and the issue was resolved within a few hours. Normal service has been restored quickly and we apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused.”