Unicel cell phone customers throughout the Northeast were without service for much of the day Tuesday while the company’s technicians worked to fix the problem.

About 250,000 customers in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York and parts of Massachusetts were without service starting around 4:45 a.m., Unicel spokeswoman Miriam Svobodny said in a phone interview from her Alexandria, Minn., office.

She said a software malfunction in a switch, which is the way the company routes calls, was at fault for the outage.

For most of the day, a message on Unicel’s Web site said that the company was experiencing outages in the network and that teams were working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

By 5 p.m. the message had been changed to: “Wireless service to Unicel customers has been fully restored this afternoon as of 2:30 p.m. [EST]. Thank you for your patience as we worked to resolve these issues.”

Despite the message, however, at least some customers in Maine did not have service restored until after 4 p.m.

Other companies who share cell phone towers with Unicel did not experience any problems, according to Svobodny.

“We have done our very, very best to resolve the issue,” she said.

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