Vodafone Network Crippled By Break-In

Vodafone’s UK network has been crippled by a break-in at one of its technical facilities. The outage affected millions of customers’ voice, data and text services on Sunday night and Monday morning.

Reports say the outage has affected up to 3 million customers, and was caused by damage at the company’s Basingstoke technology centre. The network has confirmed it was the Basingstoke centre, and is facing a surge of criticism for the failure – or absence – of any back-up for the facility.

Where was the back-up plan?

The problem was reported in the early morning on Vodafone’s technical forums, as well as Facebook  and Twitter, and was confirmed by the network.

“We had a break in last night at one of our technical facilities which resulted in damage done to some of our equipment,” said a company statement. “This means that some customers may be experiencing temporary loss of voice, SMS and Internet services. We are working quickly to restore these and will be back to normal as soon as we can.”

The problem started shortly after midnight and is still continuing for some users at the time of writing, mostly centred in the South of England and Wales. Estimates of the extent of the problem vary, but the effect seems to be random – some Vodafone users in the eWEEK office were virtually unaffected, while others had service restored at around 11am.

Criticism of the company has focused on the fact that its network apparently had a single point of failure which was described by tweeters as “frankly unforgiveable”.

All UK mobile phone operators are facing a capacity squeeze as networks come under pressure from a surge of data use, but Vodafone normally comes out well in surveys.  Vodafone has previously adopted femtocells to increase coverage indoors, but been criticised for its advertising claims.

Vodafone has not responded on its back-up plans, but has said that user privacy will not be breached by the break-in.

BBC journalist Maggie Philbin has tweeted that the outage affects those customers whose SIM details are stored at Basingstoke.