Vodafone Network Crash Leaves Millions Of Australians Impacted

Vodafone Australia is urgently investigating a major mobile network outage that has left customers across the country struggling to make calls, access data and, in some cases, limited to SOS mode.

The outage hit on Thursday morning, with reports beginning around 7.30am AEST and peaking near 9am, according to outage tracker Downdetector.

More than 8,000 outage reports were logged, with customers in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra and regional centres reporting service failures.

Vodafone’s own network status checker also appeared to be affected during the incident, returning a ‘502 Bad Gateway’ error.

“We are aware that some customers are experiencing intermittent issues with Vodafone mobile services and we are urgently investigating,” a Vodafone spokesperson said.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We will provide an update as soon as possible.

“We recommend customers power cycle their device to restore services.”

Vodafone, owned by TPG Telecom, is Australia’s third-largest mobile network operator behind Telstra and Optus, with more than five million mobile customers. Its network is also used by several smaller brands including Kogan Mobile, Lebara, TPG, iiNet and Internode.

The outage comes as Australia’s telcos remain under major pressure over network reliability and emergency call access.

The last high-profile telco outage came from Optus last year, when a botched firewall upgrade left hundreds of people unable to reach Triple Zero, in a failure later linked to two deaths.

More to follow.