My (stock) Nexus 5 updated to lollipop while I was in Lanzarote on Thursday. All went well and my phone carried on as normal after the update. My problem started when I got back to the UK on the Friday. I turned off airplane mode when we landed and the phone came up with no service. After much switching on and off playing with settings there was still no joy. My daughters sim would work fine in my N5 but my sim in her N4 was drawing a blank so I ordered a replacement sim card and when that arrived I popped it into my phone and… no bloody service again.
So off I pop to ASDA and grabbed a handful of them free sim cards you see at the checkouts.

1st new card in to my N5. No service and after that will not work in any other phone.
2nd new card in to my daughters N4 without issue and then put into my N5 and works fine.

Flashed a factory image of lollipop from Google.

3rd new card into my N5 and works fine.

Does anyone have any idea why my phone was destroying sim cards before flashing fresh software.? My No service issue is sorted (or will be when my new sim arrives from Virgin) but being a bit of a nerd when I comes to phones and PC’s this has got me stumped. Even the poor woman from VM was suicidal by the time our hour long call had finished.

I hope you were on WiFi, a 500mb data download abroad could be ££££ (or has the European union put pay to that?)!

Yup it was wifi, data was turned off upon landing. I did notice the calls were a lot cheaper this year.

Purely speculation but the maybe the update somehow confused your location and you got the wrong ‘radio’ or a localized one based on your location at the time and once home it spat its dummy out for some reason.
The factory image would have reflashed radio amongst other things (2 or 3 before it flashes the OS iirc) and maybe that’s put everything as it should be.

All a guess of course! Strange though. Lollipop has not been a smooth transition for many it seems.

It’s sweet as a nut now but I do suspect that doing the update in Lanzarote could have thrown a mahoosive spanner int he works. Whats puzzles me is that I have 3 dead sim cards.