Over 130,000 customers were relieved to hear that Vodafone has confirmed its UK network is now fully restored, after a widespread outage on Monday caused the loss of broadband and mobile data services for several hours. The disruption started in the early afternoon on October 13, affecting 4G, 5G, and home broadband services across major cities including London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, reports of problems peaked at over 135,000 around 3:20 pm BST, making it one of the largest network incidents in recent months. Users flooded social media to complain of lost connections, failed customer service lines, and an inability to access Vodafone’s website and mobile app.
“On Monday afternoon, the Vodafone network had an issue affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services,” a spokesperson told The Independent. “This was triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of our vendor partners which has now been resolved, and the network has fully recovered.”
In the early evening, Vodafone said its systems were “recovering,” though around 4,000 users were still reporting connectivity problems by 6 PM. On Tuesday morning, the company confirmed all services were operating normally.
The outage impacted virtual network operators Voxi and Lebara, which both rely on Vodafone’s infrastructure thus causing secondary disruptions. Industry analysts said early signs pointed to an internal configuration or routing error rather than an external attack, an increasingly common cause of large-scale telecom failures.
Regulatory attention is expected to follow from the UK’s communications watchdog Ofcom. The organization is monitoring the situation and could request a technical report detailing the exact cause and steps to prevent a recurrence.
Vodafone has not yet indicated whether customers will receive compensation. Under Ofcom’s automatic compensation scheme, broadband users can be eligible for payments if service loss extends beyond 48 hours.