Thousands of UK customers report broadband issues

Hundreds of Vodafone clients throughout the UK have reported its providers are down.

Downdetector, which screens internet outages, confirmed greater than 130,000 individuals had flagged issues affecting their Vodafone broadband or cellular community on Monday afternoon.

In line with its web site, the agency has greater than 18 million clients within the UK, together with practically 700,000 house broadband clients.

In an up to date assertion on Monday night, Vodafone apologised to clients and stated its community was “recovering”.

“This afternoon the Vodafone community had a difficulty affecting broadband, 4G and 5G providers,” an organization spokesperson stated.

“2G voice calls and SMS messaging had been unaffected and the community is now recovering.

“We apologise for any inconvenience this prompted our clients.”

It comes after individuals on social media stated they had been struggling to entry Vodafone customer support operators, amid ongoing points affecting cellular information and broadband.

Many additionally stated they’ve had problem accessing the corporate’s web site and app, which generally permit individuals to view the standing of its community providers.

Clients have additionally taken to social media to complain of “full outages” of their space.

The problems seem to have begun for patrons shortly after 15:00 BST.

Web monitor Netblocks said in a post on X that dwell community information confirmed Vodafone was experiencing “a nationwide outage” impacting each broadband and cellular information.

Some clients expressed being doubly pissed off by not with the ability to entry their Wi-Fi or cellular information.

“Type it out quickly please,” wrote one pissed off X consumer – who stated they had been having to make use of a espresso store’s Wi-Fi to entry on-line providers, with out the means to take action utilizing their cellular information or broadband.

One other stated they had been self-employed and couldn’t work due to the outage, including: “By no means regretted extra having my cellular and broadband on the identical community.”

The problems are additionally understood to have impacted some Vodafone retailers.

The problems affecting Vodafone providers have additionally impacted clients of different telecoms corporations that use its community.

Downdetector noticed the same spike in stories on Monday afternoon from customers of the cellular community Voxi, which is owned by Vodafone.

Lebara, which piggy-backs off Vodafone’s community, has additionally been affected by the corporate’s outage.

“Outages have been reported throughout a number of networks throughout broadband and cellular providers,” stated Sabrina Hoque, telecoms professional at Uswitch.

These, she added, might be “a extremely irritating expertise for patrons, particularly when it isn’t clear how lengthy it might final”.

Vodafone has not but stated how lengthy it expects its outage to final – although its web site since seems to have come again on-line.

Cloudflare Radar, which tracks and shows patterns in international web visitors, stated in a post on Bluesky earlier it had “successfully dropped off the web, with visitors dropping to zero”.

The corporate has additionally not stated what prompted the problem affecting its networks.

“Incidents like this are sometimes attributable to a technical fault or configuration error relatively than a significant cyber-attack, so till extra particulars are confirmed it is best to not speculate,” stated Daniel Card, a cyber professional with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

“Having groups able to diagnosing and responding quickly to community failures is vital to sustaining public belief and maintaining the UK’s digital infrastructure working easily.”

Extra reporting by Ewan Somerville.