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Official Merger Website for Vodafone and Three UK Vanishes UPDATE3

Friday, Oct 4th, 2024 (10:01 am) - Score 10,080
Vodafoneandthree-merger-website-error

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.

Vodafone-and-three-website-virus

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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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and .
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13 Responses

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  1. Avatar photo Old Blue Shirt Guy says:

    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?

  2. Avatar photo htmm says:

    “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.

  3. Avatar photo thehighyeast says:

    11:10 Site back online now

  4. Avatar photo LJ says:

    You might want to re-run a search on that URL because it seems to be working fine for me

  5. Avatar photo Zakir says:

    The website is back up and running now

  6. Avatar photo Yatta! says:

    The website is live and viewable

  7. Avatar photo Mark says:

    Just wait until the class action lands in the press
    This won’t be going ahead!

    1. Avatar photo Michael Fallow says:

      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?

  8. Avatar photo Jack says:

    The main vodafone.co.uk website got blocked by Google Safe Browsing on Wednesday

    1. Avatar photo insertfloppydiskhere says:

      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.

  9. Avatar photo Andrew Gasking says:

    Yeah it’s gone again.

  10. Avatar photo Jason says:

    Just as reliable as vodafone themselves

  11. Avatar photo Andew says:

    It got blocked by my work for enterprise malware and phising

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