The broadband outage that hit Orange in the UK on Monday has been fixed and customers have been restored to “full service” according to the company.

The firm lost connection to between 60,000 and 100,000 of its customers at 4pm (GMT) on Monday afternoon after what the company described as a “network equipment failure”.

A full 90 per cent of connections were, according to Orange, restored by 9pm (GMT) Tuesday. The remaining connections were fixed “within hours” after that, it said.

According to Orange, only those customers connected to its Local Loop Unbundled network were affected.

Tim Johnson, chief executive at broadband market information firm, Point Topic warned that such spectacular outages are bound to have an effect on consumers’ belief in cheap or ‘free’ internet services. “I think there’s going to be an increasing battle about this [customer service]” says Johnson. “The ISP who is able to demonstrate that they can actually run the networks and accept responsibility for problems will win out… This is not the best start for Orange.”