Thousands of Vodafone customers across Australia have been left without mobile phone service following a massive network crash that affected the major telco. Aussies in major capital cities including Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane reported that they were unable to get reception from their phones on Wednesday afternoon due to the glitch. Online website Down Detector which tracks mobile phone, internet, banking and social media outages reported that thousands of mobile phone services provided by the telecommunications company were down as of 4.30pm.
According to news that technical issues had led to the outage which disrupted ‘mobile services, including calls and data’. The problem is understood to have since been fixed. ‘We can confirm a brief technical issue this afternoon caused intermittent disruption to some mobile services including calls and data,’ the spokesperson said. ‘Our technical teams have resolved the issue and services are returning to normal.’
‘I can’t make calls. Vodafone hasn’t said anything but DownDetector online indicated heaps of people with Vodafone are having problems at the moment,’ she wrote. ‘A couple of minutes ago my signal went to SOS only Back to four bars but still can’t make calls.’ ‘We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience and thank them for their patience.’ Disgruntled customers took to social media to share their irritation. One woman reported she was having ‘major issues’ with the network.
Another woman was stuck in a service black hole at a highly inconvenient time and said it was ‘so bad and ridiculous’. ‘The worst part was I was in a phone screening call for a job that I’ve applied [sic] and really wanted it so much!’ she wrote. More than 5000 incidents of mobile phone reception and connection issues were reported to the Down Detector website by 4.34pm. That number however has come down in the hours since with only 351 incidents of mobile phone connectivity issues reported as of 6:34pm.
