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Millions of Smartphones in 11 Countries Were Taken Offline Yesterday by an Expired Certificate (theverge.com)
Ericsson has confirmed that a fault with its software was the source of yesterday's massive network outage, which took millions of smartphones offline across the UK and Japan and created issues in almost a dozen countries. From a report: In a statement, Ericsson said that the root cause was an expired certificate, and that "the faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned." The statement notes that network services were restored to most customers on Thursday, while UK operator O2 said that its 4G network was back up as of early Friday morning.
Although much of the focus was paid to outages on O2 in the UK and Softbank in Japan. Ericsson later confirmed to Softbank that issues had simultaneously affected telecom carriers who'd installed Ericsson-made devices across a total of 11 countries. Softbank said that the outage affected its own network for just over four hours.
Although much of the focus was paid to outages on O2 in the UK and Softbank in Japan. Ericsson later confirmed to Softbank that issues had simultaneously affected telecom carriers who'd installed Ericsson-made devices across a total of 11 countries. Softbank said that the outage affected its own network for just over four hours.
This wasn't Ericsson brand cell phones going offline because of this certificate. This was *ENTIRE CELL NETWORKS* going offline because the backend hardware's certificates were being rejected because they expired without replacement certificates in place.
Having a different brand of cell phone doesn't help if your phone is rightly rejecting expired certificates from the cell network, or if the cell network is not authorizing new cellular connections because it can't connect to servers.
This was likely a backend problem, either with authentication servers for the basestation/router licenses, or some centralized bckend service that was actually web based.