Both Vodafone and Optus suffered severe network headaches yesterday, leaving customers without calls, SMS or internet functionality around Australia. By way of an apology, Vodafone is giving its customers free data all weekend.
In a blog post about the incident Vodafone’s chief technology officer, Benoit Hanssen, offered his sincerest of apologies:
I want to say sorry to our customers for any network issues you experienced today and let you know exactly what happened. At approximately 11.00am (AEST) services across Western Australia were impacted by a transmission network failure.
As we were restoring services at approximately 1.00pm (AEST), problems occurred which had an impact on our network nationally.
The service was restored by 4:10pm AEST, but not before some customers had drawn the comparisons between this latest outage and the Vodafail dramas experienced by the carrier back in 2011.
Vodafone’s CTO was quick to clarify that this isn’t the old network dramas coming back to cause problems:
Over the past three years we’ve completely rebuilt our 3G and 3G+ networks to ensure you have fast reliable mobile coverage. Last year, we launched a lightning-fast 4G network right around Australia. While no network can guarantee it will not experience issues from time to time, we’re working to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
To apologise for the problems, Vodafone will offer all of its customers around Australia free data for the weekend.
From midnight on Friday (tonight) through to 3am on Monday 23 June, Vodafone data won’t be charged to your plan.
Download all the things! [Vodafone]