SoftBank, which has faced network outage caused by Ericsson-made software errors, said it received a report from Ericsson saying that the failure caused by the software also occurred simultaneously in other telecom carriers across 11 countries.
Ericsson is yet to comment on the number of countries. Earlier media reports suggested that networks of O2 in Britain and SoftBank in Japan have suffered network outages due to the software error.

SoftBank engineers recovered the network to the normal operation by adapting the older version of the software to all packet switching machines. “SoftBank will work together with Ericsson and investigate this issue to prevent further recurrence,” SoftBank said in a statement.

SoftBank and other telecom operators have been using the Ericsson software since nine months. Ericsson said it has taken action to minimize impact and support the restoration of services.

Ericsson has identified an issue in certain nodes in the core network resulting in network disturbances for a limited number of customers in multiple countries using two specific software versions of the SGSN–MME (Serving GPRS Support Node – Mobility Management Entity).

“The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned. We work hard to ensure that our customers can limit the impact and restore their services as soon as possible,” Borje Ekholm, president and CEO of Ericsson, said.

An initial root cause analysis indicates that the main issue was an expired certificate in the software versions installed with these customers. A complete and comprehensive root cause analysis is still in progress, Ericsson said.

SoftBank said its LTE 4G mobile phone services, fixed line services and SoftBank Air services were not available from 1:39 pm to 6:04 pm on Thursday, December 6, 2018, due to network outage caused by Ericsson-made software errors related to its packet switches, covering customers nationwide.

At 1:39 pm on Thursday, December 6, 2018, the SoftBank Network Center detected software’s malfunction in all of the packet switching machines manufactured by Ericsson, which are installed at the Tokyo Center and the Osaka Center, covering mobile customers nationwide.