Automatic plugin updates fail on cPanel site

I am running WordPress on a cPanel site. All used to be good, until a few weeks ago I asked my hosting supplier to roll back my site from a backup.

The restore worked, and the site is running fine, but now I cannot do any automatic plugin updates. What happens is that it asks for the ftp password and everything appears to run properly, and it reports success. But the update hasn’t actually been applied, so it immediately offers the update again.

If I do a manual update (using ftp), that works fine.

Also, if WordPress needs an automatic update then that also fails – the only difference being that at least I do get an error message, which stupidly I didn’t note down. But again doing a manual update worked fine (so I can’t now generate the error message again).

I have spoken to my hosting provider and they have checked permissions, but they’re not entirely sure what is required so they have asked me for further instructions on what exactly I want them to do.

In case it is relevant… this is multisite installation, although I’m only running one site.

I have tried setting wp-content permissions to 777, but that hasn’t made any difference.

Where do I go next?