Vodafone service returns after outage across the UK left thousands unable to access the internet

Vodafone went down across the United Kingdom today, leaving thousands of customers unable to access 4G internet and make calls for three hours.

The problem seems to have arisen shortly after 9.20 this morning.

According the outage-tracking website Downdetector, complaints about the Vodafone service peaked at around 10:51 this morning, with nearly 3,000 reports. 

Particular hotspots appear to have included London and the south of England, as well as Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow.

Vodafone is now encouraging any user affected by the issue to restart their devices. 

The network provider told MailOnline the outage was caused by ‘a fault with a piece of equipment in our core network’ that affected ‘a small portion of our customers.’

However, Vodafone said it was unable to explain the cause of the issue, identify the equipment at fault, or determine exactly how many customers were affected.

‘We’re aware of a network update which is causing customers to have signal and connection issues,’ Vodafone spokesperson Katie wrote on Twitter.

‘We can confirm that our engineers are working to restore the service as a top priority. Sorry for any inconvenience caused while we get this fixed.’

At 12:31, Vodafone tweeted out that the issue had been addressed.

‘We’ve just had news that this should all be resolved. Can you give your device[s] a quick restart for me please,’ Vodafone spokesperson Liam wrote.

Disappointed customers took to Twitter to complain and see if they were not alone in being affected by the outage.

‘Is the Vodafone mobile network down for anyone else?’ wrote user @Seunte.

She also drew attention to the status of the firm’s network checker, which was displaying the error ‘HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.’

Since the tweet was posted, the network checker has been restored to operation. 

Meanwhile, Vodafone UK Business customer Alex Donaldson tweeted that he had both ‘no connection’ and ‘signal problems’, while Colin Gallacher replied that non-business customers were also experiencing issues with the service.