Vodafone has said it has fixed a problem that left thousands of its customers unable to connect to the internet.
The mobile operator, which has more than 1 million broadband customers, had been inundated with queries on its Twitter account from users complaining about their broadband connection on Monday morning.
The number of complaints about internet access peaked at more than 2,850 just after 9.30am, according to the website Downdetector, which tracks outages.
The telecoms company launched an investigation into the problem and just before 3pm tweeted that engineers were resolving the issue and beginning to reconnect customers.
“We have now fixed the issue impacting just over 1% of our home broadband customers today,” said a spokesperson for the company.
“Customers should already be seeing their connectivity return. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience to anyone impacted today, and can confirm this was an isolated incident.”
The outage caused major disruption for customers, particularly those working from home, with some saying their landlines were also affected.
“Followed all help instructions and still not connected,” one Twitter user said. “Please help! Got work to do today.”
Another expressed annoyance that Vodafone’s customer service team were advising those affected to follow diagnostics using its chatbot service when in fact the problem was a nationwide outage.
“Looks like it’s a national outage that they are failing to tell people about and instead have them waste time on useless diagnostics and rebooting of routers. Useless,” the user tweeted.
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Under Vodafone’s terms and conditions for home broadband and phone services, customers may be eligible for compensation – but only if the problem persists for at least one day.
The outage came as Vodafone customers faced a 14.4% increase in the cost of their telecoms packages. The increase, which is above inflation, is typical for the broadband sector, which has been criticised by the consumer rights group Which? and is the focus of an Ofcom investigation.
Last week, thousands of Virgin Media customers experienced internet, telephone and TV outages. The problems last Tuesday were widespread enough that Virgin Media’s corporate website was unavailable for several hours.
