Vodafone UK Struck by Easter Outage of Fixed Home Broadband

Customers of Vodafone’s fixed line broadband ISP, which is supplied to UK consumers via both Openreach and CityFibre’s respective networks (FTTC and FTTP lines), appear to be suffering from an Easter service outage that began earlier this morning (around 8:30am ish for some people).

The issue, which is currently still ongoing, has resulted in the following statement from the operator: “We’re aware of and investigating an issue impacting some of our home broadband customers since this morning. Getting our customers reconnected is now our top priority, and we’re incredibly sorry for any inconvenience this is causing.”

At this time, we don’t know for sure if this is impacting both the Openreach and CityFibre sides of their services, or if it’s more restricted. Interestingly, Vodafone’s router often still thinks it’s connected to broadband (suggesting a possible DNS or routing / peering problem), and that may prevent those with a 4G backup dongle (Pro) from benefitting from the operator’s failover system. In that case, we’d suggest physically unplugging the router from the fixed broadband line, thus allowing the 4G backup to kick into life.

The outage follows only shortly after Virgin Media suffered a major outage of its own, which appears to have been caused by a targeted DDoS attack.

UPDATE

The outage has been resolved, although Vodafone has yet to issue any details of what caused the incident or to explain why it took them so many hours to acknowledge that a major outage was even occurring.