Vodafone Fixes Broadband Outage That Affected Thousands

Vodafone has apologised for an outage that affected about 11,000 of its home broadband customers for most of the day on Monday.

The company said the outage was an “isolated incident” but did not give details as to the cause.

A number of users complained on social media that the outage had affected their ability to work from home.

The issue began on Monday morning, with complaints to website Downdetector peaking at more than 2,850 just after 9:30 a.m.

Vodafone investigated and said on Twitter just before 3 p.m. that engineers had resolved the issue and were reconnecting customers.

Home working

“We have now fixed the issue impacting just over 1 percent of our home broadband customers today,” Vodafone said in a statement.

“Customers should already be seeing their connectivity return. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience to anyone impacted today, and can confirm this was an isolated incident.”

A number of users tweeted that the issue was preventing them from working from home.

One user said the loss of a day’s work had cost them £860.

“Thanks…. Could you send me the details of the person I need to invoice for that loss?” the person wrote.

Price increases

Vodafone replied with a link to its compensation policy, which in some cases repays the user £9.33 per day, but only if the service has been down for “two full working days”.

A similar issue affected more than 50,000 Virgin Media O2 customers last Tuesday.

The problems come as broadband providers institute a price increases in April, with some customers seeing a nearly 15 percent increase in their bills, according to Uswitch.

In-contract price hikes by broadband provides have been criticised by consumer rights group Which? and their transparency is the subject of an Ofcom investigation.