How big was Orange's outage?

We're getting some conflicting reports here about a service outage that affected Orange customers on Wednesday evening.

On the one hand, we have Modaco talking about a 4-hour-plus outage cutting off 1.5m customers. On the other we have Orange itself, denying those times (not, interestingly, the 1.5m figure though) and issuing this statement:

"Some of our customers may have experienced problems making calls, sending messages or using Orange data services between the hours of 7pm and 9pm on Wednesday night. Service has been fully restored and we apologise for any inconvenience caused."

Were you affected? What went on?