Vodafone and Optus networks are back online today, following yesterday’s nation-wide outages that left some customers outraged with their inability to to make phone calls, send text messages or use data. To make amends Vodafone has offered free data this weekend to its customers.
Vodafone said they first suffered a network outage in Perth on Wednesday morning due to a “transmission network failure”, however reports of disruption soon spread nationally. It was the telco’s first major network incident since they addressed the connection issues that plagued them in 2010 and 2011.
Vodafone said national services were restored by 4.10pm yesterday, but data services in Western Australia remained affected until 6.30pm. “We’re now investigating to find out the root cause of the problem,” said Vodafone Chief Technology Officer Benoit Hanssen in a statement.
“We know our customers had a less than perfect network experience today and we want them to know we’re sorry. We want to make good by offering them unlimited data access all weekend,” he continued. “While no mobile network in the world can guarantee it will never experience occasional issues, we’re working to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
The free data will be available from midnight AEST Friday June 20th, until 3am AEST Monday June 23rd.
Optus customers were also affected by yesterday’s outage from around 3pm, and according to Fairfax Media were still reporting issues as late as 7pm. While Optus have yet to release an official statement, the did take to Twitter to apologise for “any inconvenience caused”.
The issue also reportedly affected customers who use other telcos on the Optus network, such as Amaysim and Virgin Mobile. According to Virgin’s Twitter feed, the issues were resolved within a few hours.
