Orange has got its broadband network back up and running, with access restored early this morning.

The problems began on Monday afternoon and Orange would only say publicly that "network issues...are affecting a number of customers".

Orange's status page continues to claim full availability for all broadband, dial-up, email, forums and web hosting services.

A secret squirrel did email us the following snippet:

I work for Orange, in a role that has reasonable contact with the Alcatal guys who manage the Orange broadband infrastructure. The outage was caused by an "unauthorised" change to the network which one of the Alcatel guys performed.

As I understand it, the effect of this was a permissions problem with the hardware located out at the switches and exchanges, and now requires an engineer to visit each of the 4000+ sites to restart a few bits of kit. You will find that one by one the regions come back up, but at present approx 50 per cent of the LLU customers are still offline. I would imagine it will be another day or so before the rest of the customers are back online.

Several other Orange customers complained they had long-standing problems sending emails - because Orange servers have been blacklisted by spam blocking services - and that Orange refuses to take the issue seriously.

We received this in response form Orange:

"We are aware that from time to time Spamcop add us to their 'blocklist'. As a major ISP we have a team who deal with all abuse reports and who work to ensure that spam is managed in such a way that we avoid, wherever possible, getting added to lists of this kind." ®