Many Australians, including some of our guys, were affected by Vodafone’s network outage yesterday, which left many Vodafone customers unable to send or receive SMS, and worse yet, unable to make or receive telephone calls.
Fortunately for me, this wasn’t too serious — I wasn’t able to call home to find out what to bring for lunch — but I’m sure plenty of others had more important calls and SMS unable to be made. To say sorry for this, Vodafone has announced that this weekend, all customers will be able to use as much data as they like to make up for the network issues yesterday.
Vodafone’s Chief Technology Officer Benoit Hanssen told Ausdroid:
We know our customers had a less than perfect network experience today and we want them to know we’re sorry.
Over the past three years our network team has worked tirelessly to ensure our customers have fast and reliable mobile coverage. To apologise we want them to enjoy unlimited data access all weekend.
The free data period will run from midnight on Friday 20 June 2014 to 3.00am on Monday 23 June 2014.
Hanssen also described what went wrong yesterday that caused this fairly significant issue.
At approximately 11.00am (AEST) services across Western Australia were impacted by a transmission network failure.  As Hanssen’s network team was restoring services at approximately 1.00pm (AEST), problems occurred which had an impact on the network nationally. Some customers experienced issues with call, SMS and data services.
By 4.10pm (AEST) all network services were restored nationally except for data services in Western Australia, which were restored at 6.30pm (AEST).
Of the issues, Hanssen said:
Our only priority today was restoring full network services to all customers as soon as possible. We’re now investigating to find out the root cause of the problem. While no mobile network in the world can guarantee it will never experience occasional issues, we’re working to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Our team is proud of our network. That’s why we want to say sorry by giving them what we know they value the most – data – so they are free to surf, tweet, post, stream, download, click and play without limits.
I’m sure Vodafone users will appreciate the fairly quick response, and the offer of some free data to apologise for it. With my personal hat on, I would think perhaps the better (and more appeasing) solution might have been to offer a blanket credit on customer’s bills, as this would more directly address the concerns about their services being unavailable for five hours or so.
However, that said, I think Vodafone’s offer remains quite generous, and I’m sure that I (and others) will enjoy a little bit of extra data this weekend. Might be a good opportunity to grab the laptop, find a strong LTE coverage area, and download some things faster than I could at home!
How were you impacted by Vodafone’s outage yesterday? Did you lose business, miss important personal calls, or something else? Let us know!
I think this shows why everyone should be on Telstra where there are no issues.
That’s very generous of them. They could have just apologised and left it at that but hey, they went a huge step further and opened the Data flood gates. Good on’em!
I was trying to text people about the birth of my wife and my first child. It didn’t send for a while but a few minutes later sent the text 3 times in a row. People probably thought I was super keen to share the news. I only have a mobile, no landline so it does make me think I need a VoIP backup or something in an emergency. But to me it is still a first world problem.
I didn’t notice any trouble with my service yesterday but I’d definitely agree that their response to this was rapid and the free data weekend is definitely generous (and I’m sure I’ll take advantage of it)
Is optus doing anything about it? I missed a very important phone call and several emails because of this yesterday
That’s it, apologise for network issues by giving away unlimited data, thereby crippling your network and pissing everyone off all over again.
The network issue wasn’t related to a lack of capacity. Capacity issues with Vodafone haven’t been an issue since 2010. I think it’s a great offer by Vodafone to limit the damage, and I suspect the network will cope fine.
No it wasn’t, I’m just saying that giving everyone unlimited data for one weekend could potentially result in network issues!
Greg, once you go on the Vodafone 4G network you won’t be questioning capacity. It’s amazing!!
It wasnt only Voda optus customers could not make and receive calls and sms too. Optus twitter account asked to switch off and switch on phone but didn’t help..got fixed by itself by 7pm
Do we know why both Voda and Optus were affected? Having one shared transmission path that can take down two networks when faulty is a bit of a worry.
Minor question Chris, are Vodafone doing this free data for all customers (both pre and post paid), or is it for post paid only?
Pre and post mobile mate (:
Just unsure about mbb.
Mbb included