Following the network outage this morning caused by a break in at a Basingstoke IT facility, Vodafone have issued the following Q&A response to the problem:

Q & A

What has happened?

We had a break in last night at one of our technical facilities which resulted in damage to some of our equipment.

Can you confirm this happened in Basingstoke?

Yes.

When did it happen?

It happened between 1.00am and 2.00am this morning.  Our network control centre was immediately alerted as were the police.

What was stolen?

Some specialist network equipment and IT hardware was stolen. 

Which areas are customers affected?

Loss of service is mainly confined to parts of the M4 corridor and some areas either side.

How many customers are affected?

Several hundred thousand customers may have been affected.

Is it true up to 4 million customers have been affected?

That figure is grossly exaggerated – several hundred thousand may have been affected. We have over 19 million customers. 

When will services be restored?

Voice services are now largely back up and running and we expect to be back to normal this afternoon.

How many other facilities does Vodafone have like this in the UK?

We have other similar sites but are not sharing details of these for commercial reasons.

Have you experienced anything like this in the past?

Nothing of this nature.

What security measures have you put in place for other similar sites?

All our sites are protected by high level security systems – we’re reviewing these with the police in the light of last night’s break in.

 

 

You can see using our Seek A Tweet app that the damage does in fact appear to have mainly affected users around the M4 corridor region of the country:

http://www.seekatweet.com/?distance=624&lat=54.59275415276933&lng=-3.3123779296875&zoom=5&filterkeywords=vodafone

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