The official website that was setup last year to support the proposed mobile mega-merger between Vodafone and Three UK – https://vodafoneandthree.uk – mysteriously vanished at the start of this week and has yet to return after several days of waiting. But the issue is more likely to be an awkward technical one than a sign of something more dramatic, we think.
Generally speaking, you wouldn’t normally expect the main website for one of the UK’s largest telecoms mergers to simply vanish for a week; that’s a bit on the unusual side. We first spotted the issue on Monday, but initially ignored it, as websites often suffer occasional disruption and such things are usually resolved within a few short hours or 1-2 days.
By Tuesday, we noticed that the website was still offline and the registration status of the domain on some whois checkers was listed as ‘Suspended‘ (example), while Nominet’s lookup (here) noted that “the Registry has configured the domain to not function in the DNS by setting ‘server hold’.” But issues with Domain Name System (DNS) assignments don’t usually take a full week to fix.
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All of this prompted ISPreview to ask one of the operator’s PR contacts for an update, at which point we were informed, still on Tuesday morning, that it was “just a temporary issue“. Fast-forward three more days and it’s still offline, but will hopefully return soon (we have today asked for a bit more detail and an update). The issue follows shortly after both operators set out several commitments that they hope will enable the competition watchdog to give their deal the green light (here). But the outcome remains uncertain.
UPDATE 11:43am
Good news, it’s back online.
UPDATE 11:47am
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Several of our readers have noted that the https://vodafoneandthree.uk website has been flagged by various online virus and malware scanners for security concerns (phishing and malware content), which might help to explain why it’s been offline (probably needed to check and clean). See the VirusTotal test below.
UPDATE 4:58pm
A spokesperson for Vodafone told ISPreview: “We’re aware there has been a technical issue with the site, which we’re working on and hope to have it resolved soon.”
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The current state of that website pretty much sums up my experience of Vodafone and Three’s mobile network in the last month, so is it a fault or by design?
“still on Tuesday morning, that it was “just a temporary issue“”
And it is now Friday. 2 telco companies, who want to merge, allegedly to the benefit of their customers, can’t host a simple webpage.
11:10 Site back online now
You might want to re-run a search on that URL because it seems to be working fine for me
The website is back up and running now
The website is live and viewable
Just wait until the class action lands in the press
This won’t be going ahead!
I’ve heard bits and pieces about this also. Are you able to share some more information? Just a pointer would be good, have seen the issue is with Three rather than Vodafone? Is that correct?
The main vodafone.co.uk website got blocked by Google Safe Browsing on Wednesday
Yeah noticed that too, I think it was one of their AWS sites getting blocked, not the main vodafone.co.uk website since I had it on NextDNS on Edge.
Yeah it’s gone again.
Just as reliable as vodafone themselves
It got blocked by my work for enterprise malware and phising