Vodafone hit by nationwide 4G outage

Vodafone suffered a nationwide outage of its 4G cellular network on Friday, with users across Australia unable to access mobile data and voice services for 10 hours.

Customers started complaining of service issues in all major cities around 11:00am AEST on Friday.

Ookla’s Downdector service showed spikes in outage reports in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.

Some customers reported that their service was limited to only 3G, with others reported having no reception at all.

Vodafone has confirmed the issues, which it said impacted 4G mobile services and caused data services to revert to 3G.

“We are aware of an issue impacting 4G services nationwide,” a spokesperson told iTnews in a statement.

“Data services may be falling back to 3G intermittently, causing congestion and slower speeds for customers.

“We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank customers for their patience.”

Vodafone had identified the issue causing disruption by 1:10pm and began progressively restoring 4G services an hour and a half later. Services were fully restored by 9:43pm.

“In the coming days, we will be offering free data services to our customers to say sorry. We will let you know when that will happen,” the telco said in its last update on Twitter.