Overview
- Reports of service interruptions began around 7:30am AEST and peaked near 9am on Thursday morning with more than 8,000 complaints logged on Downdetector.
- Many customers in major cities and regional centres reported phones dropping to SOS or emergency-call-only mode, and users of MVNOs that run on Vodafone’s network, such as Kogan Mobile, were also affected.
- Vodafone apologised, advised customers to restart devices, said it was urgently investigating, and its online network status checker returned error messages during the incident.
- A company spokesperson told Reuters and other outlets the disruption was caused by an outage at one of Vodafone’s network hubs and that most services have now been progressively restored.
- The outage highlights wider concerns about telco resilience in Australia after recent high-profile failures and could prompt closer regulatory and customer scrutiny of network infrastructure.