One Expired Certificate Took Down a National Mobile Network
John Sansbury
1 min read
On 6 December 2018, millions of O2 customers in the UK lost data services. In Japan, SoftBank went down the same day. Carriers in 11 countries were affected.
The cause was not a cyber attack or a fibre cut. It was a single expired software certificate in an Ericsson system. Nobody knew it was a single point of failure. Nobody knew it was about to expire.
The compensation Ericsson was believed to have paid O2 alone was in the order of £100 million.
The lesson from The Journey to Service Excellence: single points of failure are not always hardware. They can be software, licences, certificates, suppliers, or one irreplaceable person whose knowledge lives only in their head.
When did your organisation last go looking for its weakest link, before it found you?
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