Updated ,first published
Vodafone says it has fully restored its mobile network after a power failure at one of its hubs cut services for potentially millions of customers across Australia on Thursday morning.
The carrier, owned by TPG Telecom, said a power issue at one of its network hubs about 8am AEST triggered the outage, and that all services had since been restored. It said it was reviewing the incident and working to strengthen its network against a repeat.
More than 8000 reports were lodged on the tracking site Downdetector at the peak, with affected users dropping to SOS mode across most capital cities and many regional centres.
Affected users reported their phones dropping to SOS mode across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra, as well as regional centres. Customers on Kogan Mobile, which runs on the Vodafone network, were also cut off.
Vodafoneβs own online network status checker failed during the outage, returning error messages.
The company did not say how many customers were affected.
βAll Vodafone network services have been fully restored following an outage earlier this morning,β a spokesman said. The company said some customers experienced intermittent connectivity as services came back, and apologised for the disruption.
βCustomers who could not access the Vodafone network were able to access triple-zero by connecting to other available mobile networks during this time,β the spokesman said.
The peak consumer body, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, said the outage was a fresh reminder that mobile networks were not held to the same reliability standards as other essential services.
βEvery major outage leaves consumers disconnected from work, family, banking, government services and essential communications,β the networkβs chief executive, Carol Bennett, said. βThese outages are not just an inconvenience. They have real economic and social consequences.β
Bennett said customers deserved timely information about what had failed and when services would return, and called for minimum reliability standards for mobile networks. The group says polling it commissioned found 76 per cent of consumers support such rules, and that legislation before parliament could be amended to introduce them.
She noted the outage came less than a fortnight before new rules took effect requiring telcos to keep mandatory outage registers, giving customers clearer reporting on significant disruptions.
Australiaβs telcos remain under heavy scrutiny over repeated price hikes, the reliability of their networks and emergency calling. A Senate committee spent much of late 2025 and early this year grilling the major carriers after an Optus failure on September 18 left hundreds of customers unable to reach Triple Zero across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of NSW. The 14-hour outage, caused by a botched firewall upgrade, was initially linked to four deaths, though Optus later said police had connected two fatalities to the failure.
Vodafone has also faced its own reckoning, with chief executive IΓ±aki Berroeta telling senators in December that two deaths had been linked to Triple Zero failures on its Vodafone network, both involving older Samsung handsets running outdated software. The inquiryβs chair, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, accused the industry of a βcover-upβ over how slowly one of those deaths was disclosed.
The communications watchdog, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, is investigating the Optus outage, and the federal government has ordered a wider review of the laws governing Triple Zero. New rules now require telcos to report network outages to the regulator and emergency services in real time.
Broader frustration with telcos is also on the rise, with complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman up 5.7 per cent over the most recent quarter.
βWhen people canβt use their mobile, it disrupts access to basic necessities and stops people getting on with their lives,β telecommunications industry ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said. She said the problem was exacerbated for customers in regional, rural and remote areas with fewer alternatives.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.