Liv McMahonTechnology reporter
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Vodafone says it has resolved an outage on Monday across its network that left thousands of people across the UK without internet access.
More than 130,000 reports were flagged to web outage monitor Downdetector on Monday afternoon, as customers complained their Vodafone broadband or mobile data had stopped working.
In a statement on Tuesday, the company said the outage was “triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of our vendor partners which has now been resolved, and the network has fully recovered”.
“We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers,” Vodafone added.
Melanie Pizzey, chief executive and founder of the Global Payroll Alliance, said the company could “face a wave of compensation claims from affected customers and businesses, particularly if financial losses or missed deadlines can be directly linked to the downtime.”
She added that while it was resolved relatively quickly, Vodafone’s outage had still caused “significant disruption”.
“For businesses reliant on Vodafone for mobile and internet connectivity for day-to-day operations, it likely caused widespread delays and a noticeable dip in productivity,” Ms Pizzey said.
Daniel Card, a cyber expert with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, said that such outages “underline just how critical strong digital resilience and cyber skills are, not only for telecoms providers but across every sector”.
“Having teams capable of diagnosing and responding rapidly to network failures is key to maintaining public trust and keeping the UK’s digital infrastructure running smoothly,” he added.
‘Dropped off the internet’
The firm – which according to its website has more than 18 million customers in the UK, including nearly 700,000 home broadband customers – said issues had impacted its broadband, 4G and 5G services “for a short time” on Monday.
Cloudflare Radar, which tracks and displays patterns in global internet traffic, said in a post on Bluesky on Monday Vodafone’s problems meant its services “effectively dropped off the internet, with traffic dropping to zero”.
Customer reports to Downdetector began to rise shortly after 15:00 BST, peaking at more than 130,000 by 16:00 BST.
People on social media had complained that, as well as being unable to use their broadband or mobile data, they also could not access Vodafone customer service operators or the company’s website.
A Vodafone web page usually allowing customers to view the status of its network services and check for any local disruption was also inaccessible during the outage.
Some customers expressed being doubly frustrated by not being able to access their Wi-Fi or mobile data.
“Sort it out soon please,” wrote one frustrated X user – who said they were having to use a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi to access online services, without the means to do so using their mobile data or broadband.
Another said they were self-employed and could not work because of the outage, adding: “Never regretted more having my mobile and broadband on the same network.”
BBC News
A Vodafone store in Clapham, south-west London, was seen by BBC News to have information signs on its windows, with multiple customers waiting outside asking staff what was going on with their signal.
Customers of other telecoms firms that Vodafone’s network were also knocked offline.
Downdetector saw a similar spike in reports on Monday afternoon from users of the mobile network Voxi, which is owned by Vodafone.
Customers of Lebara and Talkmobile, which piggy-back off Vodafone’s network, were also affected.
Sabrina Hoque, telecoms expert at Uswitch, said such outages, particularly those impacting multiple networks, can be “a really frustrating experience for customers, especially when it’s not clear how long it could last”.
Additional reporting by Ewan Somerville.
