Vodafone has said a massive blackout in its internet coverage yesterday was not caused by a cyber attack.
The issues have now been fully resolved, according to the company, after hundreds of thousands of people reported their wifi, 4G and 5G connections dropping out.
“On Monday afternoon, for a short time, the Vodafone network had an issue affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services,” said a Vodafone spokesperson.
“This was triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of our vendor partners which has now been resolved, and the network has fully recovered.
“We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers.”
As well as internet connections, Vodafone’s app, website and customer services were also down.
At its peak, more than 130,000 people reported problems to the internet status checker Downdetector.
Vodafone users were shown an error message when trying to access the internet provider’s app
Vodafone users contacted Sky News and posted on social media to find out if compensation would be given to affected customers.
“We all better get some compensation or I’ll be cancelling my contract,” said one X user.
“Are they paying any compensation to those affected?” asked a Sky News reader. “This outage must have had major effects on ordinary people/business.”
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According to Sabrina Hoque, a telecoms expert at Uswitch, customers could be entitled to compensation of £9.76 for each calendar day their broadband doesn’t work – but only if it is down for more than two days.
“Ofcom advises that compensation for mobile signal outages is ‘dependent on the circumstances’,” she said, “but in extreme cases, where repairs take much longer, you may be entitled to an additional refund or account credit.”
Considering the outage only lasted a few hours for most people, they may not be entitled to claim.
However, Melanie Pizzey, chief executive of the Global Payroll Alliance, said the company could now face “a wave of compensation claims … particularly if financial losses or missed deadlines can be directly linked to the downtime.”
One X user warned that last night, scammers pretending to be from Vodafone had called and directed him to download an app in order to receive compensation.
“Who knows how many people they [are] scamming as we speak?” he said.
