Updated Mobile network operator EE appears to have been hit by a nation-wide outage.

People took to Twitter this morning to complain of the network and data outage affecting large swathes of the country:

@EE Data Network Down in Manchester area ?. Can't get any data connection on any either phone #ee #networkdown — Neil Reid (@tech2xs) January 22, 2015

@ee So, BT taking you over was a good thing, was it? I assume the total lack of cellular data presently was a ‘planned outage’ was it? #ee — Paul (@Dogtrouser) January 22, 2015

@EE is there an outage in South Wales? No data signal at all, despite resetting my phone, and flicking to airplane mode. — Rich John (@theboyrichjohn) January 22, 2015

According to sites tracking digital downtime, EE customers have been experiencing issues since 07:55 this morning.

Down Detector reported a spike in service wobbles on its website this morning.

Last August the operator experienced similar problems, with users reported seeing "PDP authentication failure" error messages on their smartphones.

Update

An EE spokeswoman said the problem has now been fixed, but denied it was a nation-wide issue. “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."

The Luton datacentre routes to customers in parts of the UK outside of the Luton area. ®

* TITSUP: Total Inability To Support Usual Performance.