Thousands of UK Vodafone customers report broadband outages

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Thousands of Vodafone customers across the UK have reported having problems connecting to the internet.

The Twitter account run by the mobile operator, which has more than 1 million broadband customers, was inundated with queries from people complaining about their broadband connection on Monday morning.

More than 2,700 users have complained of problems, according to the website Downdetector, which tracks outages.

Vodafone said it was investigating.

“We’re investigating an issue impacting some of our home broadband customers since this morning,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Getting our customers reconnected is now our top priority, and we’re sorry for any inconvenience this is causing.”

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.

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.

“If the Vodafone home broadband and phone services are disrupted for maintenance or due to a technical fault on the network you may be entitled to a partial credit of your monthly cost based on the number of days you are without our services,” the company’s policy states.

“If the Vodafone home broadband and phone services are continuously unavailable, you may be entitled to a proportionate refund of the charges paid by you for the period when the services were unavailable.”

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The outage comes as Vodafone customers face 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.

The connection problems at Vodafone come almost a week after 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.