As many as 635,000 people were hit by the outage that downed the network of colourful mobile phone operator Orange earlier today.

Services are returning to normal and full coverage is expected to be restored "in the next couple of hours", so we're told.

Orange won't say what the problem was but it claims that at its peak "less than five per cent of customers were affected". Orange has some 12.7 million punters using its network.

However, our readers are beginning to give us a picture of what really went on.

Said one: "I have two mobiles on the same contract. The current 'small outage' started about 11pm last night leaving one phone doing a rather good impression of a paper weight with the other working fine. Bizarre or what?"

No, bizarre. ®

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Orange network gone titsup (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/26013.html)