Vodafone Fixes Issue After Voice Outage

Vodafone’s network is back to normal operations, after a problem on Tuesday caused customers across the UK to experience problems making and receiving voice calls.

Customers were still able to text and utilise data, but according to the outage website Downdetector, customers began complaining of problems when making calls from 5pm on Tuesday. The issue lasted a couple of hours.

The issue of outages on mobile networks is more significant during the lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In March for example, just before the UK entered its lockdown, interconnect issues were blamed for outages on all mobile networks including O2, Vodafone, EE and Three.

Spam issue

But Vodafone responded quickly to the latest outage, and a spokeswoman for Vodafone told the BBC that a fix had been made at 18:10 BST and that its operations had “started recovering” shortly afterwards.

The spokeswoman added that not all Vodafone’s users had been affected.

Earlier the operator had told the BBC that the incident had impacted “a large number of customers.”

“I understand it’s particularly inconvenient, especially in a lockdown situation,” a spokesman added.

It seems that the problems began when the operator made a change to block a range of telephone numbers used to make spam calls.

“Somehow that had a knock-on effect to the voice platform,” the operator reportedly said.

Arson attacks

Vodafone has had other outages during the lockdown, but not on its own making, as false conspiracy theories about 5G resulted in some mobile towers and masts being attacked.

There was a surge in attacks on mobile phone towers or masts over the Easter weekend for example, with a further 20 suspected arson cases being reported.

Vodafone UK’s chief executive Nick Jeffery at the time revealed that one of the attacked towers provided mobile connectivity to the Nightingale hospital in Birmingham, denying family the ability to say their goodbyes remotely to loved ones.

In March Vodafone admitted there had been a surge in data traffic on its networks around the world amid the Coronavirus pandemic.

It said that data traffic on its networks had risen by 50 percent in some markets.

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