Vodafone fell over in the UK this afternoon, with Register readers reporting that many services including mobile coverage, internet services, and even the company’s own status page went down.
The outage began on Monday at 14.25 BST, and 30 minutes later it peaked when monitoring website Downdetector.co.uk reported that almost 140,000 customers were unable to use the service. One Register reader, Steve Maxted, noted that “Vodafone is down. Hard! Everything. Landline internet, mobile internet, website… It’s not just DNS, as ping also fails.”
Ah, yes, that old standby – it isn’t DNS – it can’t be DNS – until it is. However, something more serious appears to have affected the telco. The Register contacted Vodafone for more details, but the company has yet to respond.
Another reader told us: “One of our multi-network roaming SIM providers just warned us that ‘we are currently aware of an ongoing issue with the Vodafone UK Network. This seems to be affecting a large number of consumer devices across the country.'”
Our reader’s phone registered a strong signal, but data appeared to be broken, and while an inbound call worked, “trying an outbound call caused my Pixel 7 to lock up completely and do a very slow reboot – first time I’ve seen that.”
Less than ideal. Readers also reported that broadband was affected by the outage, which is odd since we would have expected cellular and internet connectivity to be largely separate. Hopefully, there are no single points of failure lurking within Vodafone UK’s infrastructure.
Vodafone and Three recently announced a deal whereby customers of one could use the other’s network. At the time of writing, Three does not appear to have any issues, so it would have been a good time for a network switcheroo. However, as one reader observed, the problems did not seem to be with the signal strength but rather with something else within the system.
A spokesperson at Vodafone told us:
“This afternoon, for a short time, the Vodafone network had an issue affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services. 2G voice calls and SMS messaging were unaffected and the network is now recovering. We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers.”
Source: Vodafone keels over, leaving millions disconnected • The Register
Robin Edgar
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