If you're a Vodafone customer who lost access to broadband and mobile internet earlier this week, you might be wondering if you're owed compensation for the outage.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people won't see a penny from Vodafone.
The outage started around 2pm on October 13 and continued for hours. Vodafone, which recently agreed a £15bn merger with Three UK to form VodafoneThree, has more than 18 million mobile customers and over 600,000 home broadband subscribers across the UK. It's unclear exactly how many were impacted by the nationwide outage, but independent website Down Detector was tracking 130,000 reports every minute.
Thousands of Vodafone customers rushed online to complain about problems with their home broadband, 4G and 5G mobile network in early afternoon on October 13
| DOWN DETECTOR UKPhone calls and text messages were unaffected by the issue, which only impacted 4G and 5G networks. Some customers took to social media to describe problems accessing resources on the Vodafone website.
A spokesperson for VodafoneThree said the outage was caused by a "non-malicious software issue".
The full statement reads: "On Monday afternoon, for a short time, the Vodafone network had an issue affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services. This was triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of our vendor partners, which has now been resolved, and the network has fully recovered.
"We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers."
So, what about compensation?
Under Ofcom's rules, you're only entitled to automatic compensation if your service stays broken for more than two full working days. Since the vast majority of Vodafone users saw connections return later on Monday evening, that crucial deadline has passed. Down Detector data shows some broadband subscribers were still experiencing issues on October 14, but even that is 24-hours short of the Ofcom threshold.
It wasn't just regular Vodafone customers who got caught up in it, people using Voxi, which is owned by Vodafone, found themselves cut off too. Even parts of Vodafone's own website went down, leaving frustrated customers unable to reach support services when they needed them most.
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But here's the thing — if you were still having problems from Wednesday onwards, you could be in line for £9.98. That's because October 15 onwards was two full working days after the outage started on Monday.
You won't get this money automatically, though. You'll need to contact Vodafone directly to claim it. As they put it on their website: "If you're experiencing issues with your broadband, please get in touch with us."
The compensation covers each day your service is broken beyond the two-day window. So if your internet is still playing up, it's definitely worth getting on the phone or messaging them to report it and stake your claim.
The money won't land in your bank account if you do qualify. Instead, you'll see it as a credit on your bill within 30 days of your service being fixed. It might take a bit longer to actually show up on your statement, but the credit will be applied to your account within that timeframe.
If you're among the unlucky few still struggling with connection issues, don't wait around hoping it'll sort itself out. You can contact Vodafone through various channels as it might not even be related to the "non-malicious software issue" that caused the mass outage earlier this week, it could be something specific to your account.
Additional Reporting By Henry Saker-Clark, PA Deputy Business Editor
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