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Memories of ‘Vodafail’ as customers are left without voice, SMS, data services for several hours.
Vodafone Hutchison Australia customers were left without voice, SMS and data services for several hours on Sunday after the operator’s network suffered a widespread outage.
Users started experiencing intermittent issues early evening yesterday. Services were not fully restored until the early hours of this morning.
In a statement on Monday, the company said one of its routers was to blame.
"During the disruption, which was caused by a router issue, 4G services were unavailable. Customers would have automatically accessed 2G and 3G services, but congestion was experienced," Vodafone explained.
"We thank our customers for their patience and apologise for the inconvenience caused," the company said.
For Vodafone, Sunday’s outage would have revived painful memories of 2010-2011, when the operator suffered a series of network outages, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of customers, and earning it the nickname ‘Vodafail’.
So far this year though, Vodafone rival Telstra has suffered the highest number of network issues.
The most recent outage struck in May, when some NBN and ADSL customers had difficulty connecting to the Internet. This followed three separate incidents affecting its mobile networks in February and March.
Telstra undertook an end-to-end review of its networks in partnership with its suppliers, spending A$50 million on implementing the subsequent recommendations.
In June, Telstra committed a further A$250 million to improving reliability, and in August it announced a A$3 billion (€2.07 billion), three-year capex plan designed to upgrade its networks and back office systems.
