Vodafail returns with seven-hour Vodafone outage

A seven-hour outage to Vodafone's 4G network last night sparked the re-emergence of the nightmare 'Vodafail' movement the telco has been working aggressively to distance itself from in recent years.

Vodafone customers were unable to make calls and texts or access data services from around 6:30pm following an issue with what Vodafone attributed to a router.

The outage affected the telco's 4G services, with resulting congestion crippling services on Vodafone's 2G and 3G networks.

Services began returning at around 11pm, Vodafone said. It claims all services were fully restored at 1:30am. It did not detail the cause of the outage nor how many users were affected.

"We thank our customers for their patience and apologise for the inconvenience caused," the telco said in a statement.

The return of the 'Vodafail' moniker on social media is reminiscent of a series of ongoing network issues the telco experienced for several years from 2010 that lost it hundreds of thousands of customers.

It has spent many millions improving its network to restore its reputation and customer base over the past four years, declaring its turnaround complete in early 2015.

The telco is still losing money, however, but boosted its subscriber numbers by 239,000 in its most recent half-yearly results.

Update 5:40pm:

Vodafone said it would offer 2GB of free data as compensation for the outage.

"It’s our way of saying sorry to those customers affected by a router malfunction which caused intermittent disruption to mobile services last night and this morning. It’s also to say thank you to our other customers for their loyalty," the telco said in a statement.

"While not all customers experienced service disruption, all postpaid customers and prepaid customers who top-up within a month will receive an additional 2GB of data.

"We apologise sincerely for this disruption and we hope the 2GB of bonus data will allow customers to enjoy more of the Vodafone network."