Outage hits Vodafone network

UPDATE 2.15pm: Vodafone engineers are scrambling to restore mobile phone coverage to thousands of West Australians affected by an outage this morning.

A spokeswoman for the mobile phone network said a failed transmission link was responsible for the outage which started at about 9am.

She said engineers were working hard to fix the problem and hoped to return national coverage within an hour.

“We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused. We know how important it is for our customers to stay connected and rest assured we are working as hard as we can to restore services,” she said.

Users took to social media to blast the outage, which many first discovered when shown an “SOS only” message on their mobile phones.

Vodafone was one of the top trending topics in Perth on Twitter as users brought back the “vodafail” hashtag widely used during previous network outages.

Others Tweeted their disappointment about not being able to make business calls during the outage.

A company spokeswoman was unable to estimate exactly how many WA mobile phone users were affected, but it is understood thousands were without coverage.

At 10.20am, a Vodafone spokeswoman said engineers hoped to have coverage returned within an hour but at 3.20pm the company admitted some WA customers were still “having issues” with its data services.