Customers on the Vodafone UK mobile network, particularly those in Southern England, have suffered a serious loss of Mobile Broadband (internet), voice and text messaging (SMS) services. The outage occurred after criminals broke into one of its "technical facilities" (i.e. Basingstoke exchange) and damaged some of their equipment.

It happened between 1.00am and 2.00am last night. Some "specialist network equipment and IT hardware" was stolen and Police are currently investigating. Vodafone claims that the outage is mainly confined to parts of the M4 corridor, though "some areas" either side are also known to be experiencing problems.


Vodafone is home to about 19 million customers and apparently "several hundred thousand" have been affected by the problems. Voice services are now largely back up and the operator expects to be back to normal later this afternoon.

Vodafone claims that its sites are "protected by high level security systems" and that they have never seen anything of this nature before. Clearly those systems were not enough to protect their assets and a review is already underway.