The firm – which according to its website has more than 18 million customers in the UK, including nearly 700,000 home broadband customers – said issues had impacted its broadband, 4G and 5G services “for a short time” on Monday.
Cloudflare Radar, which tracks and displays patterns in global internet traffic, said in a post on Bluesky, external on Monday Vodafone’s problems meant its services “effectively dropped off the internet, with traffic dropping to zero”.
Customer reports to Downdetector began to rise shortly after 15:00 BST, peaking at more than 130,000 by 16:00 BST.
People on social media had complained that, as well as being unable to use their broadband or mobile data, they also could not access Vodafone customer service operators or the company’s website.
A Vodafone web page usually allowing customers to view the status of its network services and check for any local disruption was also inaccessible during the outage.
Some customers expressed being doubly frustrated by not being able to access their Wi-Fi or mobile data.
“Sort it out soon please,” wrote one frustrated X user – who said they were having to use a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi to access online services, without the means to do so using their mobile data or broadband.
Another said they were self-employed and could not work because of the outage, adding: “Never regretted more having my mobile and broadband on the same network.”