Many of Vodafone’s 3.2m customers were left unable to make phone calls this morning, after a break-in crippled network.
The burglars who broke in over night at a Vodafone technical facility caused mass interference to the firm’s network, with voice, text and mobile Internet services all unavailable.
It was still unclear this morning exactly how many customers were affected; however social networking sites like twitter showed the problem to be widespread, with many people posting complaints.
A spokeswoman said: “We had a break-in last night at one of our technical facilities which resulted in damage done to some of our equipment.
“This means that some customers may be experiencing temporary loss of voice, SMS and Internet services. We are working quickly to restore these and will be back to normal as soon as we can.”
The burglars targeted Vodafone’s Basingstoke data centre, where millions of pounds worth of damage was caused to routing equipment, and networking gear was stolen.
The break-in targeted Vodafone’s, a major hub for the network, where it would have had routing equipment worth many millions of pounds.
Vodafone reassured customers that the break-in would have no impact on privacy.
