Vodafone Fault Hits Broadband and Mobile Across UK and Europe

Customers of both Vodafone’s fixed line broadband and mobile data (3G, 4G and 5G) services from across the UK and Europe appear to be suffering from degraded internet connectivity on their network after an unspecified problem occurred with one of their international transit links, but it’s now being fixed.

The first reports began to come in at around 2pm today but a spokesperson for the operator on Twitter said that services are now being restored, “We are aware that some customers are experiencing issues with their mobile data & broadband services. Our engineers are working hard to fix the issue, services are now being restored. This could take some time and sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

Some customers appear to have got around the connectivity issues by using a third-party DNS provider, while others found some luck with a Virtual Private Network (VPN), although experiences do vary. By the sounds of it there may have been a configuration or routing/peering problem somewhere within their network.

During the event customers reported difficulty connecting to websites and other internet services, as well as extremely high latency times and a lot of jitter. Internet transfer speeds were also extremely slow to some sites and servers, but not to others.

UPDATE 14th June 2019 @ 8:29am

The unusual fault looks to have also hit Vodafone’s customers outside of Europe (e.g. India), which does rather confirm that it must have been some sort of issue with their tier 1 transit links. We can’t recall ever having seen an operator affected like this across both their fixed line and mobile estate at the same time before.

In addition, a number of people seem to be saying that they’ve been seeing similar, albeit more sporadic, issues with their connectivity for the past week or two.