 Vodafone services including calls and texts were hit by intermittent failure, yesterday. All states were affected.
Data problems were encountered in some areas, although other customers’ mobile internet services remained unaffected.
WA customers were the first to be hit at 11am. But by 1pm, the network failure had hit customers in all states.
Optus customers, too, had service issues yesterday.
Vodafone are now offering carrot to customers – letting them to use as much data as they like from midnight (AEST) tonight to 3:00am, Monday 23 June.
“We know our customers had a less than perfect network experience today and we want them to know we’re sorry,” said Chief Technology Officer Benoit Hanssen.
Voda users are free to surf, tweet, post, stream, download, click and play without limits.
The initial outage was blamed on a transmission network failure but when engineers went to fix the issue, they discovered additional problems and there was a “domino effect,” a spokesperson told CN.
Service has resumed by 4.10pm eastern time nationally except for mobile data services in Western Australia, which were restored by 6.30pm.
“We know how angry customers get when they don’t have coverage,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t want to go down that road again.”
Vodafone has 4.95 million customers in Australia.
The scenario is eerily familiar to the network crash nightmare Vodafone suffered in 2011 -12 which caused it to lose millions of customers.
Only recently it managed to repair its broken rep. And then this happened.
Hanssen said, “Our only priority today was restoring full network services to all customers as soon as possible. We’re now investigating to find out the root cause of the problem. While no mobile network in the world can guarantee it will never experience occasional issues, we’re working to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Over the past three years our network team has worked tirelessly to ensure our customers have fast and reliable mobile coverage. To apologise we want them to enjoy unlimited data access all weekend.”
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