Orange has coughed up to a glitch that left more than 10,000 people without access to their mobile phone service.

The snag surfaced late last week and affected punters who were upgrading or swapping their SIM cards.

For some reason - and we ain't been told - things just didn't seem to click and punters were unable to connect to the service.

In all, Orange reckons that some 10,300 punters were hit by the problem, which it says has now been resolved.

The company has apologised for the problem and assured us that punters signing up now won't face a problem. The mobileco, however, is still working through the backlog to ensure that those hit by the incident are connected.

However, El Reg is aware of at least punter who has been without a phone service since the incident kicked off last week. ®