Tens of thousands of Vodafone users report problems with their internet connection
The outages began Monday afternoon, according to monitoring site DownDetector, which reported more than 130,000 problems with Vodafone connections.
A company spokeswoman said: “We are aware of a major issue on our network currently affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services.
“We appreciate our customers’ patience as we work to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”
The company has more than 18 million customers in the UK, with almost 700,000 using Vodafone’s home broadband connection.
Vodafone users have expressed their frustration on social media.
“It’s like Vodafone has just been wiped off the earth. Nothing works,” said one X user.
Vodafone users received an error message when trying to access the internet service provider’s app
The Vodafone app also appears to be down for users, with the company’s website also briefly down.
The ‘network status checker’ on the website was also down and when Sky News tried to test the customer helpline it did not ring.
“There’s Vodafone broken, then Vodafone wiped off the face of the fucking planet,” another X user posted.
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Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, said the outage shows how dependent we are on modern infrastructure such as mobile networks.
“Outages will always naturally raise the first suspicions of a potential cyber incident, although current evidence is more suggestive of an internal network failure than a confirmed attack,” Mr Moore said.
“The sudden outage, combined with the inability to access customer service lines, reflects classic symptoms of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which attackers overwhelm the network and cause the site or systems to collapse.
“However, malicious or not, this once again highlights our heavy reliance on digital infrastructure, particularly at a time when we are increasingly reliant on mobile networks for everything,” he said.
“Ultimately, resilience is essential, whether the cause is a direct cyberattack, a supply chain issue, or a critical internal error. »