Vodafone says outage affecting thousands of customers resolved

Vodafone says it has resolved an outage on its network on Monday that left thousands of people across the UK without internet access.

More than 130,000 messages were logged on Downdetector's web-based outage monitor on Monday afternoon as customers complained their Vodafone broadband or mobile data had stopped working.

In a statement Tuesday, the company said the outage was “caused by a non-malware issue with one of our vendor partners, which has now been resolved and the network has been fully restored.”

“We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our customers,” Vodafone added.

Melanie Pizzi, chief executive and founder of the Global Payroll Alliance, said the company could “face a wave of compensation claims from affected customers and businesses, especially if financial losses or missed deadlines can be directly attributed to the downtime.”

She added that while the issue was resolved relatively quickly, the Vodafone outage still caused “significant disruption”.

“For businesses that rely on Vodafone for mobile and internet connectivity in their daily work, this is likely to have resulted in massive delays and a noticeable drop in productivity,” Ms Pizzi said.

Daniel Card, a cyber security expert at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, said such failures “highlight how important digital resilience and cyber skills are, not just for telecoms providers, but across all sectors.”

“Having teams that can diagnose and respond quickly to network failures is key to maintaining public trust and the smooth running of the UK's digital infrastructure,” he added.

The company, which according to its website has more than 18 million customers in the UK, including almost 700,000 home broadband internet customers, said the problems affected its broadband, 4G and 5G services “for a short time” on Monday.

Cloudflare Radar, which tracks and displays global Internet traffic patterns, reported in a post on Bluesky On Monday, Vodafone's problems meant its services were “effectively disconnected from the internet and traffic dropped to zero”.

The number of customer reports on Downdetector began to rise shortly after 15:00 BST, peaking at over 130,000 by 16:00 BST.

People on social media complained that not only were they unable to use broadband or mobile data, but they were also unable to access Vodafone's customer service operators or the company's website.

The Vodafone webpage, which normally allows customers to view the status of network services and check for local outages, was also unavailable at the time of the outage.

Some customers have expressed double disappointment at not being able to access Wi-Fi or mobile data.

“Get this sorted out soon please,” wrote one frustrated user X, who said they were forced to use cafe Wi-Fi to access online services without being able to do so using mobile data or broadband.

Another said they were self-employed and unable to work due to the outage, adding: “Never regretted having my mobile and broadband on the same network.”

Customers of other telecoms companies serving Vodafone's network were also disconnected from the network.

On Monday afternoon, Downdetector recorded a similar spike in messages from users of Vodafone's Voxi mobile network.

Lebara and Talkmobile customers who connect to Vodafone's network were also affected.

Sabrina Hawk, a telecommunications expert at Uswitch, said such outages, especially those that affect multiple networks, can be “a really frustrating experience for customers, especially when it's unclear how long they might last.”

Additional reporting by Ewan Somerville.