Showing excerpt of last 3 global posts stopped working

[Eskeemo]

I've been using this plugins for years to show the latest three posts from the network on the homepage of the main site. But somehow showing the excerpt of each posts stopped working. It still shows the correct title and date, but for each post it shows the same excerpt.

So far the code I've been using is this:
<?php network_query_posts('category_name=actueel&posts_per_page=3&orderby=date&order=DESC'); if ( network_have_posts() ) { echo '<ul>'; while ( network_have_posts() ) { network_the_post(); echo '<li class="news">'; $blog_name = network_get_blogname(); $the_date = network_get_the_date(); $the_permalink = network_get_permalink(); $the_title = network_get_the_title(); $the_excerpt = excerpt(15); echo '<span class="blogdate">', mysql2date('j.m.Y', $the_date), '</span>'; echo '<span class="blogname">', $blog_name, '</span>'; echo '<br />'; echo '<a class="title" href="', $the_permalink, '">', $the_title, '</a>'; echo $the_excerpt; echo ' ... <a class="readmore" href="', $the_permalink, '">lees verder ></a>'; echo '</li>'; } echo '</ul>'; } ?>

So I've found a declaration of 'network_get_the_excerpt' in the plugin php files, but if I use that instead of 'excerpt(15)', the excerpt shown IS correct BUT it is way too long and has an '[...]' included in the end.

Any suggestions on how to fix this would be great!