TOKYO, Japan - Mobile services in the U.K. and Japan suffer outage after the mobile network equipment group Ericsson confirmed that it had identified a software glitch.

In a statement on Thursday, Ericsson said that it had identified an issue in certain nodes in the core network.

The Swedish company said that the faulty software caused network disturbances for some customers and that it was now decommissioning the issues.

The company explained that the glitch which had caused the problem affected those customers that were using two specific software versions of the node Serving GPRS Support Node - Mobility Management Entity (SGSN-MME).

Ericsson said, "An initial root cause analysis indicates that the main issue was an expired certificate in the software versions installed with these customers."

According to the company, it began working with mobile companies in Britain and Japan after learning about the glitch.

The company said that it was working towards restoring full service to millions of customers that were affected by outages.

An Ericsson spokesman said, "We are aware of the issue and are working together with our customers to solve it as soon as possible."

On Thursday, after the glitch was discovered by the company, Britains second-biggest network O2, and Japans Softbank reported network outages too.

Both the companies said that the outage left many of their customers unable to access internet services.